On the 1st of January 2021, the United Kingdom ended the transition phase-out of the EU Single Market and Customs Union. To limit disruption and make the transition as smooth as possible, the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement was agreed upon and signed by both parties.
The Global Logistics Team maintains constant communication with logistics service providers to understand the changes associated with Brexit and formulate mitigation measures to maintain response readiness should any of our services be required.
Testing new Brexit Procedures
In February, the new Brexit procedures were tested with the road haulage of a package consisting of five containers of oil spill equipment from our Southampton Base to our client’s location in Montenegro. This served as a real-time experience of equipment movement since Brexit took place. The lessons learned from this shipment serves to help OSRL strengthen our service offering to our members.
Travel
During Q1 of 2021, even though travel was not busy with our usual work, we were focusing on new processes and procedures to keep our travellers safe during the global pandemic. Keeping up to date with the new regulations and restrictions being put in place globally to ensure we can mobilise our staff safely and efficiently has been our top priority, and we continue to refine our processes as the situation unfolds. Towards the end of the first quarter, we knew there would be an impact on our incoming travellers with the new restrictions for the U.K, which we have been able to test our new COVID travel procedures on several of our secondees who have maintained their schedules going to several African countries.
Another obstacle has been Brexit, which has required us to work through several scenarios involving travel into Europe, so we resolve issues before we need to respond. The GLT (Global Logistics Team) team ran an online seminar session on our Brexit preparation for the business to keep them up to date with what we have already learned as a team and what we are taking forward to implement as processes for the company.
As we entered 2021, we took time to reflect on lessons learned last year and have developed some exciting objectives for the new year working with key stakeholders across the business to drive our travel programme forward. We are planning to update you each quarter on what we as a team have been working on and what we planned for the rest of the year.
