EC Group

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EC Group - the Essex gateway to a global supply chain

EC Group, based at Grays in Essex, is one of the country’s largest fulfilment houses – a company providing a range of services that enable businesses to handle responses to their marketing and promotional campaigns. EC Group offers clients in the public and private sector an integrated range of services including a contact centre to handle enquiries and orders, design and print, marketing services, warehousing and logistics, with the back-up of an account team to manage customer service, stockholding, fulfilment and reporting. This creates what is effectively an extension of a client’s own internal facility by providing services that are difficult to handle in house.

EC Group is the oldest fulfilment house in the UK with origins going back to 1810, and the current business has been family-owned for four generations. Grays is the largest of the group’s two sites with contact centres, warehousing and account teams to serve local clients. EC Group finds that it is able to recruit the right people locally with a permanent staff of 125 and a pool of temporary workers to deal with seasonal peaks in workload.

Location is critical to a company like EC Group, as Chris Tillin, Business Development & Marketing Manager, explains,

“Many of our clients are based in central London. They feel that we are conveniently situated ‘down the road’ for meetings and local service. Grays is very close to the M25 and the M1 is just 45 minutes away. That makes it easy for us to work with clients throughout the UK, as well as London. We have our own fleet of vans to collect and deliver locally and in central London. For national distribution, we use specialist logistics companies, but we manage the quality of their service for our clients. Tilbury docks is close by which makes it easy to collect imported products and London Stansted Airport provides good airfreight facilities close to our warehouse.”

Space is also important for any company regularly handling consignments of up to 2000 pallets. “Large warehousing becomes more expensive the closer it is to London,” says Chris Tillin.

“Grays gives us the space we need at reasonable rates and, because it’s so close to the motorway network, it is a cost-effective site. We are currently doubling the size of the Grays site. Part of the extension will house a larger print-on-demand facility which will enable us to provide our clients with a more environmentally-friendly print solution by reducing the amount of waste.”

Essex has proved to be an important location to an organisation like EC Group that depends on a good transport infrastructure and affordable, high-capacity storage space that contributes to operational efficiency and reduced costs.