Entering the Niche – A Unique Case Study for the TSL Industry

You will read this article in 2 minutes. You will learn how a mid-sized transport and forwarding company smartly seized its opportunity to start a rapid expansion and outpace the competition.

It’s 2011. Joanna, one of the dispatchers, answers a call from a client. He urgently needs to deliver a pallet from a research center in Poznan to an Italian university. The matter is urgent and demanding, as the load and its equipment are easy to damage. It’s a complicated and expensive microscope that needs to be delivered in one piece on time.

A VAN vehicle with a gross vehicle weight of up to 3.5 tons sets out on the route. It can efficiently and safely deliver the load to its destination, bypassing restrictions on larger vehicles that cannot enter many city centers and sometimes physically cannot navigate places like old Italian towns.

There are more and more such situations. The Visline management sees this in time and, contrary to industry trends, redirects a significant part of its resources to developing the express transport sector with smaller vehicles. This is how the President of the Pomeranian Road Transport Association, Tomasz Rejek, remembered it:

“Visline’s management invested and thought far ahead from the beginning. The company turned towards transport with smaller vehicles up to 3.5 tons, while most carriers went the other way at that time. This decision brought huge success.”

The change in course involved offering a completely new service – express deliveries. This was followed by the creation of a dedicated department and the purchase of a significant fleet of VAN-type vehicles. The market responded very well to this decision, leading to a number of benefits that are still appreciated today.

Express freight with VAN-type vehicles enabled, among other things:

• Loading and unloading without restrictions – the ability to direct the vehicle to hard-to-reach places such as city centers, narrow roads, and areas with restrictions for vehicles over 3.5 tons.
• The possibility of transporting unusual loads thanks to increased transport security for goods particularly susceptible to damage.
• Increased flexibility in driving – the ability to overtake larger trucks on highways and expressways.

Visline regularly increases its fleet of various types of vehicles, including up to 3.5 tons. Express deliveries constitute a significant portion of all freights carried out, accounting for as much as 41% of all orders.

From the company’s perspective, the development towards smaller vehicles has proven very successful, but the customer reaction is equally important. Increased access to transport with vehicles up to 3.5 tons primarily allowed for the reduction of transport costs for smaller loads. This opened the way for more frequent use of dedicated freight services, i.e., direct transport from the loading place to the unloading place provided for a single client. Lower transport costs usually offset the higher costs of the dedicated service.

The safety of goods has also significantly improved. The load could be additionally secured, and the ability to access a wider pool of guarded parking spaces drastically reduced the number of criminal incidents.

If you want to learn more about express transport, visit https://visline.pl/en/oferta/ or talk to our dispatchers dealing with freight vehicles up to 3.5 tons.