M-box fulfilment service aims to cover all avenues
M-box, an integrated home delivery fulfilment service aimed at high-street retailers, emerging e-tailers and manufacturers, hit the ground running at its launch in June with pledges of support from some of the biggest guns of industry. They include Express Dairies, which has taken a stake in the business, and Birds Eye Wall’s, which says it plans to use the service for home delivery trials.
On the dot-com front, an early customer is likely to be online e-tailer Clickmango.com, which has been funded by Atlas Venture, the same venture capital company behind M-box itself.
M-box aims to harness a variety of existing resources and weld them into a modular package of services that can be tailored to specific requirements. Its claims to offer an “out-of-the-box” service costing half the price of setting up the individual components, with an implementation time of as little as four months.
Door-to-door deliveries will be undertaken by Express Dairies, which has been trialling home grocery deliveries on milk floats in the Hull area (e.logistics Magazine, April). It is to extend this operation nationwide, and has plans for new, more secure milk floats to back up its offering. Altogether it has around 4,000 milk rounds serving 2.2 million households.
Smaller express consignments will go by Parcelforce Worldwide. John Nicolson of Parcelforce’s logistics and contract distribution unit says the company plans to play a pivotal role in the system. More urgent items will be sent by motorbike courier.
The service also caters for leaving goods at drop-off points for collection by consumers, and M-box will be working with “selected members” of the Association of Convenience Stores.
Binding all this activity together will be an e-commerce IT system from Unipower, whose existing customer base includes Tesco Direct. The service aims to accept orders by Internet, WAP and conventional phones, interactive TV, doorstep request, mail or (intriguingly) handheld scanner. Call centre management will be provided by Brann, which claims to be the world’s largest direct marketing company.
Behind the scheme is chairman and chief executive Geoff Webb, who spent 15 years at Unilever and now runs an e-business consultancy, the Webb partnership. Clients include Tesco, Somerfield, Ahold and Cadbury Schweppes.
