Secondment and Consultancy Services

Companies only marginally involved in exporting or importing, or even more substantial exporters wishing to minimise or reduce their shipping administration costs find that the Alliance secondment service is tailor made for them.

The Alliance staff secondment service offers U.K. companies the facility of an independent assessment of the modus operandi of the staffing and departmental systems employed in the international movement of their products.

This exercise involves an appraisal of all outsource services for sea and airfreight movements on a global basis and is conducted in a discreet and unobtrusive manner by our expert audit staff. These staff seek to ensure that the optimum arrangements are in place for the carriage of your products, both on an import as well as an export basis.

Following this audit, a confidential report is made to the client’s export or finance director, highlighting any areas of concern, and making impartial recommendations as to what course of action should be adopted to remedy any shortcomings that are discovered.

Secondments can be effected either on-site or off- site, for the purposes of discretion and security (by the "arms length" method) with files, data and systems being reviewed in the Alliance local (U.K.) office.

Recent in-house secondments have culminated in the following results:-

An Alliance audit established that poor freight purchasing resulted in the client paying excessive prices for FCL (full container load) movements to South Africa. U.K. handling charges were reduced by 21% and seafreight overheads were cut by 45%.

Result: An annual saving to the Alliance client of over £86,000.00 in freight and handling charges.

Staff members were found to be under utilised, with duplication of workload and attendant inefficiency resulting in low morale and poor customer service. This particular account had minimal export business, but was paying for three staff members to handle the same! Alliance suggested retrenchment of two of these staff to the client, resulting in savings of £39,000.00 per annum in salaries and NI contributions, and outsourcing all aspects of the shipping function to Alliance.

Result: With further savings in freight charges of over £15,000.00 per annum the net reduction in the company’s budget was almost £65,000.00.

Import airfreight charges were recently scrutinised by the Alliance team, and were found to be excessive. The shipments were loaded on a deferred basis from the U.S.A. but were being billed to the client at the direct flight rates which were 112% higher than the deferred service being used. Additionally the wrong import tariff headings were being applied to the commodity resulting in even higher rates of duty than were applicable. The rates were revised downwards, and HMC are currently re-classifying the product to a more favourable ad-valorem heading.

Result: Projected savings over the balance of the year stand at £29,000.00!

Given the perennial strength of the pound, all savings in the carriage of goods must be exploited to enable U.K. exporters and importers to remain competitive.