Archive for the ‘Feedback’ Category

Busman’s holiday!

Jamie Shipley is our despatch manager and he’s on holiday in Dartmouth this week but can’t give it a rest!   Here’s a photograph he emailed to me today of some stunning Royal Jubilee topiary created out of number of different varieties of hedging – which just shows that topiary is an art form and hedging plants are versatile.   Well spotted Jamie.

Royal Jubilee Topiary in Dartmouth

After many weeks of detailed planning, we’ve finally automated our order processing!   It doesn’t sound like much but it’ll save us a huge amount of time – and that means more time with customers.   For all their hard work on the automated processes, we’d like to thank Jamie Shipley in our office who’s had a sore head on several days puzzling out the details of how to automate what we do manually, and Andy at Codepath (www.codepath.co.uk) who’s done the behind-the-scenes clever stuff  – and all the rest of the team in the sales office and at the nursery who have shown patience, flexibility and teamwork through this period of change.

We’d also like to say a big welcome James Tomkinson to our sales team.    He’s slotted in to the team really quickly and we won’t hold his allegiance to Manchester City against him.

Paul Horsfield, our despatch manager, has moved in to the sales office from the nursery office – to benefit from the automation – and so that the nursery team don’t miss him too much, part of his work has been automated too – our orders are automatically uploaded to our carrier’s system so we don’t have to type in customer names and addresses.   Paul was absolutely swamped last spring but we hope all this automation will mean that he has a less stressful time this year, whilst coping admirably with a terrific increase in orders.

We’re feeling ready for the big March rush now – our new automated system will process orders every hour even during the night so our nursery team (who start at the crack of dawn in March) will be able to pack orders before the sales office has even opened!

It’s all go!

June

We could have done without gale force cold winds and torrential rain during this last week. We do more deliveries in this week of November than any other week of the year. Thousands of customers have been placing pre-orders since the summer to make sure they get a November delivery date and we get all geared up with empty Parcel Force trailers so that we can load straight on to their vehicles (it costs us extra but it’s the most efficient way of despatching thousands of orders in one week) and extra pallet lorries.

A bit of mild weather and sunshine would have gone down really well with the despatch team but alas, it was not to be – and they’ve battled through foul weather to get the job done ….. well almost done, there’s still a big weekend/next week ahead of us to pack the fiddly little orders– and of course with orders coming in thick and fast at this time of year, there’s an extra workload to be coped with (that’s not us complaining – we’re delighted to being growing our revenue as well as our plants).

So, I’d like to say a big thank you to our despatch team – Graham, Rick, Tom, Josea, Stuart, Dan, Aggie, Paul and not forgetting the tremendous “leadership from the front” from Scott – well done guys!

June

In the past 5 years, Hedges Direct has supplied many famous customers or customers with unique projects – this is thrilling for the team here – and from time to time we’ll add details to the blog.   Of course some famous people are so famous we’re not allowed to mention them  but we are delighted to say that the contractors for some wildlife hedging at Whipsnade Zoo told us they were “delighted with both our service and plant quality.

June