CASE STUDY – Home Delivery Network Ltd (HDNL)

OVERVIEW

HDNL, the UK’s largest two-person home delivery provider, makes 8,500 daily across the threshold calls across four countries. Years of underinvestment and a broken leadership model had left the operation exposed, inefficient, and at risk of collapse.

Trigger for Intervention: Union unrest had escalated into a FTA. Clients were defecting. And HDNL’s leadership vacuum had turned daily operations into daily crisis.

THE CHALLENGE

HDNL was unravelling operationally, commercially, and culturally — all at once. It lacked a roadmap for stability or expansion.

• Union tensions — Bonus structures were unachievable, fuelling low morale and strike threats.
• Disjointed network — Four depots operated in silos with no coordination or shared goals.
• Service failures — Delivery accuracy, speed, and pick-ups had all trended sharply downward.
• Leadership void — The COO had departed suddenly, leaving no clear plan or point of accountability.
• No scalable model — The network was bogged down in expediting small customers, showing it couldn’t handle growth from insurgent eCom firms.

THE APPROACH

Gary Newbury was appointed as Interim COO to stabilise the accelerating chaos, rebuild performance credibility, and create a retail-ready model that could scale profitably.

• Diagnosed failure points — Audited depots, reviewed performance data, and surfaced critical execution gaps.
• Established leadership cadence — Introduced fast, focused daily scrums to align management, inject energy and accelerate recovery.
• Rebuilt functional trust — Resolved disconnects between transport, planning, customer service, finance and warehousing teams.
• Reset operational logic — Clarified KPIs, recast roles, and refocused all teams on consistent service delivery.
• Took full command — Engaged directly with 1,000+ staff and union reps to drive accountability and belief in what the business could achieve.

THE SOLUTION

A full-spectrum rebuild began — across flow, cost, metrics, leadership culture and network scalability.

• Restored depot control — Introduced daily metrics and control routines to highlight and eliminate inconsistency.
• Redesigned flow — Re-aligned route planning to focus on density, returns, and service for end-to-end network coherence.
• Refocused KPIs — Prioritised landing rate, pick-up rates, and calls per route.
• Restructured cost base — Right-sized labour, cut casual reliance, exited loss-making contracts.
• Built scalable architecture — Developed single DC cross-dock blueprint and initiated overnight trunking to enable growth, utilising space in 60-depot strong parcel distribution network.