Everyone loves a good bank holiday; those lovely three-day weekends that creep up on you over the course of the year. However, for the European Groupage industry, bank holidays can cause a certain amount of head-scratching, and a serious amount of forward planning – particularly when the one day turns into two, as in the case of the imminent Jubilee weekend.

While most businesses can pick up where they left off after a bank holiday weekend, the natural continuity of the distribution industry means European Groupage Networks need to be ahead of the game; pre-empting the inevitable surge of delivery demand for the first day back (usually a Tuesday)

A double bank holiday can mean double trouble, with consignments arriving in the UK on the previous Thursday and Friday potentially failing to actually reach their final destinations until as late as the Thursday of the following week – something that would knock the whole supply chain out of kilter in a manner that the industry, and indeed that the whole UK economy, can ill afford

Hellmann UK hopes to minimise the disruption to the working week by opening all three regional European depots on the bank holiday Tuesday between the hours of 8am and 4pm.

Furthermore, we will operate a complete trunk network on the Tuesday night – something that should help ensure that Hellmann maintains System Alliance standards in terms of transit times and removes the chance of bottlenecks in the distribution lines.

We have pre-organised an increase in the number of domestic vehicles in service to cover the capacity needed by each of the three depots

UK business should still feel grateful for the fact that the scheduling of bank holidays at least aims to minimise disruption by ensuring that they occur immediately after the weekend