Tight Deadlines and Faraway Places

As we speak, my team is top of the league table. Go On You Reds! We have a few players away on international duty and that's going to cause us a bit of a defensive problem for the next 3 weeks or so, but I'm confident the rest of the team will perform well and give it their all, under the circumstances.

Well, that was still playing on my mind when I got the phone call. (How spooky was that?!)

These guys spend a lot of money with us and my boss promised them the earth. Why did she do that when she didn't actually know if it could be done or not? Well, I suppose that's why she's the queen and I'm the worker bee… She talks a good game and it's my job to make it happen.

The thing is, the Africa Cup of Nations is taking place in Ghana and my company supplies a big-league corporation who happens to be one of the major tournament sponsors. We had the products they wanted, just not enough stock in the warehouse to meet their massive demand for this one event.

It was - quite literally - a tall order, and I had to fix it. I needed to find a way to place the order, arrange the pick up, shipping and customs clearance into the UK, check and process the order, arrange for the stock to be shipped to me in London, make some slight modifications, then ship the whole consignment to Accra, speed it through customs over there and get it delivered to the customer, and all before the end of the week.

For years we've been using the same shipping agent - and they were okay. Based locally, the staff were friendly enough and they usually got things done for us. So I called Matt who I knew quite well since joining the company 2 years ago. He knows his stuff; he's on the ball and always upbeat and helpful; he'd surely go out of his way to get us what we needed. I had high hopes.

Back to the Africa Cup of Nations. The first game was due to start on January 20th and the tournament ran until February 10th. Our customer only had enough supplies for the first week so we had to move fast. Then we hit the first hurdle. Matt's cut off time was 16:00hrs but the products wouldn't be ready by then because they were still in the air on their way from the manufacturer overseas. I'd heard too, that it was a nightmare to get anything cleared through customs in Ghana, so by now I was quite nervous about the whole thing - time really was too tight.

Despite our track record, Matt's company weren't prepared to give me any assurances or anything even close to a guarantee - and my high hopes began to fade away. He kept skirting around the issue, and I got even more nervous. So I made a few phone calls and sent a few emails - to try and find somebody prepared to take on the problem; somebody, anybody, please take this off my hands! Take care of the situation, give me peace of mind and let me concentrate on building and processing the order! One name kept popping up - CCL, that's Customs Clearance Ltd - it seems quite a few of my contacts thought well of them. I checked out their website at www.customsclearanceuk.com, easily found the contact details, then took a deep breath, said a small prayer and placed the call. Before I knew it, I had their top sales guy on the phone. He ran through a routine fact-finding exercise then handed me over to his very capable operations team, with assurances that they would take care of everything, from start to finish.

And that's just what they did. It wasn't simple - if it had been, anybody could have done it. Air freighting in from the Far East, doing a quickkie turnaround and getting crates of product through customs in Accra in record time? What do you think?! But they stuck with it managed the process, kept on top of their local agent and it all came out right.

My customer, out at the tournament, was pleased, and I was ecstatic, not to say very relieved. Thanks to their good relationships, CCL's local agent handled the freight movement smoothly and proficiently and the shipment arrived and cleared in good time. The sponsor - my customer - came out well and their branded goodies ended up in the right hands, and nobody ran out of supplies! They were happy, my boss was happy, and I got to sleep nights again.

13th Feb 2008

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Tight Deadlines and Faraway Places

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