November 2000

The e-fulfilment service developed by Tibbett & Britten through its Track One Logistics business (e.logistics Magazine, May) is set to flower into a more all-embracing package of services, which will include Web design, order management, payment processing and customer contact management, as well as conventional logistics.

Both B2C and B2B clients are being targeted. The first customer to take up some of the new features is a brand new business-to-business Internet company, lens-online.com, which sells spectacle lenses to the retail ophthalmic market, and started trading in October. The new offering is a group-wide Tibbett & Britten initiative. T&B will outsource elements that are considered best handled by specialists, including telesales, customer relations management, payment processing and final delivery. But it will use in-house resources to provide various core services such as warehousing, pick and pack and despatch, as well as systems integration and project management. Vertex Data Science, a subsidiary of FTSE-100 listed United Utilities, has been named as T&B's principal partner for the service. Vertex specialises in the provision of customer-facing services such as call centre operations, and is keen to maintain its expansion beyond the utility market where it originated in the late 1990s. In October it launched a new service of its own called VCRM (Vertex Customer Relationship Management).