Palletforce has been shortlisted in the 2025 Motor Transport Awards Team of the Year category for a mammoth effort to simplify trade between the UK and Ireland for our members and their customers.
Our European Services Team has worked tirelessly to ensure customers could continue to easily trade with the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland at a time when many firms found the processes and legislation too complicated to navigate.
Palletforce is the UK’s premier palletised freight network and the team needed to devise a simple, easily understandable solution to a problem that had the whole industry stumped – how to drive Irish volume growth by giving members and customers confidence that exporting was still practical.
The European Services team had to coordinate the complete redesign, relaunch and promotion of a new way of exporting. This project took over 12 months and involved a new level of teamwork and collaboration internally and with external stakeholders to meet timescale, service, delivery performance and volume KPIs. It was delivered on time and on budget. It reshaped and redefined many traditional processes, questioning how improvements could be made at every step and inspiring levels of cooperation and positivity unprecedented in the network’s history.
It included the recruitment of new member and respected family business Woodside Distribution to exclusively cover the entire island of Ireland, bringing the passion and determination needed to reignite the service and make it sector leading.
Palletforce and Woodside worked in close collaboration including hosting commercial workshops to educate members on the new service, informing them of the need for export and import declarations and that full support would be provided by Palletforce and Woodside.
Our entry to the Motor Transport Awards – the most prestigious event in the UK road logistics industry – highlighted how the Palletforce and Woodside teams contacted 1,500 importers and exporters to ensure compliance with the new, simplified system. Palletforce and Woodside worked together to host one-on-one calls with the largest trading customers, outlining the service’s benefits and ensuring immediate compliance.
Led by Lee Matthews, General Manager European Services, the team coordinated with departments across Palletforce, including IT and marketing, to ensure the new system was implemented smoothly and that all members were fully informed of the changes and encouraged to use it.
The results were immediate: freight to Republic of Ireland is up 54% since the start of 2024 and freight volumes to Northern Ireland are up 53% in the same period.
Palletforce CEO Mark Tapper said the work of the European Services Team encapsulated the best of Palletforce and showed the value of the network to member businesses.
He added: “A difficult and worrying issue faced by the whole logistics sector was only solved because of the exceptional professionalism, ambition, creativity and teamwork shown by the European Services Team.
“This was critical for us as a business to secure ongoing volumes by supporting our members and their customers, ensuring we provide distribution services that delivered confidence, an unrivalled customer experience and an ease of doing business that both enabled customer trade while providing Palletforce and its members with a competitive advantage in the marketplace.”
