One year on, Ginho has delivered on our Brexit promise to our customers. Indeed, despite the challenges and trepidation as Britain left the EU after 47 years of membership, through meticulous forward-planning, Ginho has played to its advantage and emerged stronger than ever. We have established a trans-continental infrastructure that combines world class products from our global manufacturing site with a local service that consistently achieves high levels of service, logistics and technical support across the US, 14 separate European countries, and the UK. Follow this link to read the full story from supply chain manager Joshua Hancock-Brown.

12 months on from Brexit, supply chain manager Joshua Hancock-Brown explains how Ginho Group took a proactive approach to the UK’s departure from the EU and also looks forward, with 29 more European territories on the horizon!

“Thinking outside the box is something that is second nature to us here at Ginho Europe. And as we contemplated the best way of tackling the challenges posed by Brexit, we started with a very clear, simple focus: how do we make this as easy as possible for our customers? And moved forward from there.

“We quickly took the view that we needed to be able to get to a point where all customers needed to do was take delivery and pay the invoice!

“While at the same time, minimising any impact on lead times. This meant us dealing with all the paperwork and taking responsibility for shipping. Customers could therefore continue to enjoy the benefits of DDP – delivery duty paid (as in pre-Brexit times) relieving them from the red tape, hassle and unpredictability we saw in the marketplace when operators chose to move to DAP (delivered at place).

“Meanwhile, we provided continuity and minimum disruption. With our customers operating highly efficient just-in-time manufacturing sites, a key priority was to ensure that we could continue to provide the same door-to-door shipping service. To do this, we worked with our parent company and manufacturing colleagues to negotiate and bring forward production and shipping by a week for each customer to mitigate any supply issues.

“Planning in advance of the Brexit deadline allowed us to fully understand the changes we needed to implement as well as explore any opportunities as a team and ensure smooth transition for our customers. As we were already exporting to 14 countries across Europe this required us to set up 14 separate EU VAT registrations and a new EU EORI number.

“A few more days were needed on some occasions around lead-times at our end, but given we had decided to up our stock levels in the UK and in Germany with a six week buffer, our customers were protected from any supply issues.

“And still we remain proactive! For example, a priority this year is to further improve efficiencies by making documentation processes more automated. We are looking to increase volumes and consolidate the shipping schedule alongside the introduction of service level agreements around stock levels. And we have also started to implement a customer satisfaction survey, enabling us to continually review, learn and refine our service.

“Having established a flexible, dynamic blueprint in readiness for Brexit. We can now see many positives around the UK being able to set its own trade policy and negotiate deals with other countries.

“We have ambitious plans to expand and we are now equipped to grow the business across many more EU and non-EU European territories, delivering more castings, components and assemblies for more companies across more countries and indeed continents.”

To find out more about our services, please visit www.ginho-group.com