With Easter, the Royal Wedding, and two May Bank Holidays in quick succession, this year's public holiday bonanza was a huge challenge to companies operating around the clock.
While much of Britain enjoyed two four-day weekends off celebrating Easter and then Prince William's nuptials, many businesses had to keep going despite the suspension of a number of normal services.
Phoenix IT, one of the UK's leading IT service providers, kept its army of 450 field service engineers across the UK and Northern Ireland running by supplying them with parts using the ByBox 7-day service.
ByBox is the first and only company in the logistics and supply chain sector to run a seven-day network and it has a unique model of delivering parts overnight pre-8am to its network of more than 18,000 drop boxes at 1,350 locations around the UK.
Parts are delivered into the nearest drop box to a particular engineer pre-8am, ready for collection before the start of the day's work, with all movements tracked by ByBox' innovative Thinventory ™ software platform that gives complete visibility of the supply chain at all times.
Phoenix IT has used ByBox for more than two years to support its field service engineers before recently upgrading to the ByBox 7 day network.
Paul R. Cheesbrough, Logistics Business Development Manager for Phoenix IT, said: "It is imperative for Phoenix IT to offer a 24x7 365 day service especially as such a high percentage of our customers are open during the Bank Holiday periods.
"ByBox' Bank Holiday service has allowed us to provide a full logistics delivery operation that enables Phoenix IT to be available and flexible to all our customer needs and requirements."
Phoenix IT engineers working at weekends now have easy access to the parts they require, return of spare parts is faster and the same day costs have reduced.
Mark Garritt, Managing Director of ByBox, said: "ByBox is always looking for solutions for today's fast-moving 24/7 society and our 7-day service has been created with this in mind.
"These days in many industries there is no such thing as a day of rest - people have higher expectations than they used to about services being open on Sundays and public holidays.
"We are finding that customers are increasingly asking for the seven day service and we are expecting to be busy on the next Bank Holiday."
ByBox also operates a network of 29 Forward Stock Locations across the UK which are open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, ideally suited to engineers working outside normal office hours and those that need parts urgently.
Founded in 2000, ByBox has grown from strength to strength with its ethos of 'thinking outside the box' to tailor services to customers' requirements.
The company is expanding its services into Europe, in France and the Benelux countries, and has recently been listed in The Sunday Times International Track 100 which ranks UK private companies with the fastest growing international sales over the past two years.