< Previous East Midlands Business Link www.eastmidlandsbusinesslink.co.uk PUBLIC RELATIONS I had an interesting exchange with someone recently, when discussing branding, Ai and marketing. For some, Ai, images-wise for blogs as far as I’m concerned, has been a game- changer. I have been able to be even MORE prolific in my content. It has freed me up no end in terms of productivity and getting things done that look waaaaay better than a woeful stock image would muster. For others, they have finally begun making some marketing moves. I love this. However, whilst Ai has made content so much easier to create, with psychology expert Penny Strutton. Penny is FUN. She is not from a corporate background and has a wonderful vibrancy about her. So, the photo we did to illustrate the story was dynamic. Was it a faff? Yes! Did we have to carve out 2 hours for travel and logistics? Yes. Did Penny forget the Twister mat thingy she uses and had to go back and get it? Yes. But the point is, she did. Did I fall over attempting to stretch in an unnatural way? No comment. The result is that people know we are working together, and they know why, With the rise of Ai, Greg Simpson, founder of Press For Attention PR, stresses the importance of being more ‘I’. that ease has come a tidal wave of tedium. There is less personality, simply by dint of it being way easier to bash out some copy and conjure a clever picture. It is almost too easy and with that, there is always a danger of even more “Meh” in your marketing. It doesn’t have to be like this! That’s why when I do media stories about me working with my clients, there is zero Ai. There is ME, with my client, being human and…hold the phones…having FUN! Dun, dun, durrrrrr! Take the press release I put out this week about working with business www.eastmidlandsbusinesslink.co.uk East Midlands Business Link PUBLIC RELATIONS mainly because Penny is rebranding from her “Think Forward” corporate identity, which all sounds very nice and professional BACK to her name. Why? You’ve all heard the phrase ‘People buy from people’, so put the people back into the brand. Penny’s brand is actually HER. Here’s Penny’s take: ‘‘In today’s landscape, where Ai is automating many tasks, people want to work with real people, not faceless brands. “My work has always been about helping individuals and teams thrive and by bringing my personal brand to the forefront, I’m better able to connect with clients who value that human touch. Think Forward remains the core methodology I use to deliver results but this partnership with Greg will ensure that personal touch and human message is heard clearly.” Note Penny used my name, not ‘Press For Attention PR’. In a world of Ai, be more ‘I’. Maybe the penny will drop for a few folk reading this too. A former business journalist, Greg Simpson is the author of The Small Business Guide to PR and has been recognised as one of the UK’s top 5 PR consultants, having set up Press for Attention PR in 2008. He has worked for FTSE 100 firms, charities and start-ups and conducted press conferences with Sir Richard Branson and James Caan. His background ensures a deep understanding of every facet of a successful PR campaign – from a journalist’s, client’s, and consultant’s perspective. East Midlands Business Link www.eastmidlandsbusinesslink.co.uk WAREHOUSING AND DISTRIBUTION W arehouses and distribution centres face many challenges in balance, but perhaps the most important of these is taking efficiency in hand when facing high consumer demand. There’s often an abundance of the latter thanks to e- commerce and its around-the-clock reliance on logistics. With limited warehouse space available, and more being built and snapped up before it’s even completed, business focus is more on optimising the space available than it is on expanding. Optimising layout to the best of your ability is usually the best place to start, potentially creating space while organising products in storage to show which items need to be shipped out soonest. A simple yet effective slotting system can be worked in to place fast- moving items closer to the shipping area for quicker access. Two rules of Limited space New warehouses continue to be built but are selling for a premium, with many speculatively purchased before completion by big companies. This is forcing smaller and medium-sized companies to look more at how they can optimise the space they have. www.eastmidlandsbusinesslink.co.uk East Midlands Business Link WAREHOUSING AND DISTRIBUTION thumb to keep in mind are organising stock to make movement as smooth and speedy as possible for workers and equipment, and to utilise vertical space by installing taller racks and shelves to maximize storage capacity. As an extra bonus, you might also consider implementing a cross-docking strategy, reducing the time products spend in storage by transferring them directly from inbound to outbound shipments. Outside of your own team, it’s endlessly beneficial to call in support where you can. Work closely with your suppliers and logistics partners to make everyone aware of crucial details, including demand needs and required schedules for distributing stock. This will help streamline the entire supply chain and reduce those all-important lead times. Introducing new technology can be its own heavy expense and demand on personnel training. However, if you can afford to automate some of your processes, it’s a handy boost to speed up supply, loading and inventory tracking without sacrificing accuracy. Conveyor systems, robotics, automated picking systems and RFID or barcode scanning can all help to prevent potentially costly mistakes, or reduce labour needs altogether. Investing in an advanced inventory management 34 Á © stock.adobe.com/Sawitree88 East Midlands Business Link www.eastmidlandsbusinesslink.co.uk WAREHOUSING AND DISTRIBUTION system helps improve flow by tracking stock levels in real-time, reducing overstocking and further ensuring accurate orders. For more detailed foresight however, there’s no replacing big data for analysing gradual shifts in choice and preference. Bringing in analytics software is a complex process of assessing your storage or distribution needs, selecting the right software for your metrics and performance indicators, and customising it for your objectives. But the work of identifying your goals and connecting your software with every necessary data source— including warehouse management systems, inventory databases and supply chain management tools—is the most labour-intensive part. After that, its just a matter of transferring data to a suitable format, inputting the values to track, and testing for accuracy before you let it run. With the tricky part out of the way, your new analytical software can begin to predict demand patterns, fine-tune and adjust inventory levels accordingly. It doesn’t end with external monitoring either, as improving demand forecasting accuracy ensures that you stock the right items in the right quantities, feeding back into storage space and efficient organisation year-round. Key performance indicators can also be identified and analysed through data, providing valuable insight on areas for improvement in product flow. To make sure your software is always examining www.eastmidlandsbusinesslink.co.uk East Midlands Business Link WAREHOUSING AND DISTRIBUTION these areas accurately, just remember to monitor the software’s performance and the quality of the data it produces. Continuously refine your analytics processes to extract more valuable insights and train your staff to use it so any appropriate personnel can access and interpret the data to make informed decisions. Advances in digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are offering further methods of making logistics more efficient and sustainable. They allow mistakes to be eliminated and complete visibility of a journey to be provided. Routes and transit methods can be assessed to improve efficiency and carbon emissions, while the Internet of Things (IoT) and its sensors can be used to monitor and collect data on speed, tyre pressure, driver behaviour, et al., which all impact fuel consumption and emissions. All this tech together creates chances for enhanced planning and control, opens up optimisation potential, and is key to setting emission targets by allowing accurate current emissions to be calculated. Real time transport visibility platforms are already becoming standard in the industry and many of these can also be utilised to collect data for sustainability calculations. Opportunities from digitalisation apply throughout a journey, including truck dispatch at a facility - with digitalised processes and intelligent time slot management, truck congestion and waiting times can be reduced and significant CO2 savings made as a result. © stock.adobe.com/Gorodenkoff East Midlands Business Link www.eastmidlandsbusinesslink.co.uk LEGAL SERVICES disaster Social media and a cultural shift have led to employees seeing their bosses as the enemy. It might be worth future-proofing employment material to be clearer on their rights. Preventing www.eastmidlandsbusinesslink.co.uk East Midlands Business Link LEGAL SERVICES T he prevalence of YouTube videos and “expert advice” offered by people online has led to an increase in spurious and oftentimes doomed legal challenges by employees, but while these may not end in loss from a business perspective, they still have their cost. In our country, the law tends to err on the side of the employee, which can be frustrating but is better than the legal situation in the US where money tends to dictate the winner and people can get away with almost anything. The UK has typically been less litigious than the US as well, with steady but unremarkable rates of employment tribunals. This trend is changing, with more and more employees aware of their rights and, in some cases, believing they have more rights than they actually do. A lot of the fault for this has to be laid at the feet of big tech. Social media is a haven for people offering free legal and employment advice without having to provide credentials. The old joke from people on forums was that “everyone is a lawyer when they want to prove a point” but now on Facebook, TikTok, and X (formally Twitter) you have individuals trying to farm engagement and money by offering free advice and bringing people to their videos or feeds. The problem is that legal advice is specific by design, with what one person needs being different from another, so it ends up in a situation where a disgruntled employee watches a video about their rights without realising the video is based in America, or that those rights only apply if they have worked at a company for X number of years. The advice is flawed, and does not stand up in court, but that’s little comfort for a business which has been dragged to an employment tribunal, because that will still cost them dearly. 38 Á © stock.adobe.com/NanSan East Midlands Business Link www.eastmidlandsbusinesslink.co.uk LEGAL SERVICES Making matters worse is the cultural shift toward seeing business as evil that has happened of late in our country. To be fair, this has been caused by some truly awful decisions made by big businesses, including some incredibly poor optics wherein billionaires have fired thousands of staff while also boasting of their success. The likes of Zuckerberg, Musk, Trump et al, have not done a great job of championing business owners as normal, everyday people, and this has led to an us vs them mentality from a lot of employees, which further fosters the attitude that if business owners are going to exploit them, they should prepare for the inevitable treatment by taking evidence for a future employment tribunal. Fixing any of these problems is going to require more work than can be done by any one company in our region. Obviously, loyalty to employees is great but this goes further than our region, and ultimately employees are going to be (and should be) loyal to themselves before their bosses. The wisest course of action is to update employee handbooks and contracts to be more forward with what an employee’s rights are and what is expected of them. Legalese tends to be hidden in small print and in subsections towards the back of a handbook that will never be read, but this is a poor strategy for avoiding legal trouble. Ideally, an employee should be well aware of their rights and when those don’t apply, because resources online even from official sources like ACAS aren’t always clear. For instance, if one searches on Google for “can I be fired without notice”, ACAS will promptly appear on the Google feed saying that you can only be fired without notice if you’re being fired for gross misconduct. In truth, you can also be fired without notice if you’re a new employee on a probation period and you have proven unable to do the job you have been hired for, but ACAS makes little mention of that, or at least any mention of it does not immediately show on Google. This is obviously less a fault of ACAS and more of Google, which uses AI to try and provide the best results it thinks people want, but it leads to a situation where a disgruntled former employee will believe they have a case. If an employee handbook is clearer about it, this can be averted. Additionally, the first day’s training at a company could also benefit from having an hour of it spent talking about their rights and protections when introducing them to the company and other staff members. It would only take an hour but could save many hours down the line. In both cases, speaking with an employment solicitor is a good idea. Legal documentation is oftentimes difficult for people to understand, and if you try to make it simpler then you could accidentally tweak the language in such a way that it isn’t technically correct. This would obviously lead to trouble in the future if questioned. Speak to a solicitor and ask them to look over a handbook and demystify the legalese for a future employee. A little prevention now can prevent disaster later. © stock.adobe.com/Charlie'swww.eastmidlandsbusinesslink.co.uk East Midlands Business Link FACILITIES MANAGEMENT F acilities management can be most effectively described as “ensuring the facility operates” but that term misses out on some of the key nuances of proper management. While it’s important that any facility – be it an office, distribution centre or factory – runs to its minimum requirements, facilities management is more than just making sure the doors open and the equipment works. It is ensuring that the space and the facilities available work to the highest standards available, reducing the stress and distractions that those who work there need to deal with, and thus in the long- term making a business more streamlined and more efficient. At its simplest this can involve cleaning and hygiene – an ever-increasing concern given both the pandemic and, in more recent times, the skills shortages and difficulties in recruiting. In the face of the Great Resignation, as it has been called, businesses cannot afford to appear slovenly or unclean, lest they lower the confidence of valuable staff and leave them searching for work elsewhere. Good, top-to-bottom cleaning helps not only to limit mess and clutter, but also to make employees feel better about their time spent at any given facility, reducing reasons for stress or disappointment. The same goes for equipment testing, including PAT Testing and regular maintenance checks. Aside from the downtime caused by a crucial piece of management Proper Facilities management is no longer a matter of meeting minimum requirements – it is now about exceeding them 40 Á © stock.adobe.com/Syda ProductionsNext >