UCARGO, the international freight forwarder, has been announced as a finalist in a major award scheme for the transport sector.
BIFA, the British International Freight Association, announced its shortlists for the 2022 Freight Awards earlier this month, with which UCARGO LLP has been recognised for embarking on one of its most significant and complicated projects to date. For this, UCARGO’s work in the entertainment sector involved transporting an entire carnival from one half of Saudi Arabia to the other.
UCARGO was nominated for two awards: the Specialist Services Award and the Project Forwarding Award.
The nature of the assignment was so sophisticated that it encompassed both project forwarding and going above and beyond the scope of a typical freight forwarder, leading UCARGO to be nominated for both awards which will be presented in January 2023.
Ucargo has a long history of working on large-scale Middle Eastern events. Pre-covid, the company completed a project with a long-standing client, shipping 9,000cbm overseas for the Riyadh Winter Wonderland event.
A challenging task
Between December 2021 and January 2022, UCARGO’s client began negotiations to relocate all carnival equipment from Riyadh, where it had remained for the previous two years, to Jeddah.
This may on the surface appear to be a simple movement, but several elements combined to make this one of the company’s most intricate and hands-on projects yet.
UCARGO had to deal with a huge amount of enormous, specialised, out-of-gauge machinery, that had been languishing in a hot sandy climate for two years, with moving parts decaying, lubricated components drying out, and airbags shrivelling.
The tasks included not only moving 300 pieces of equipment ranging from a small pay box to a 60-tonne trailer but also maintaining the equipment and ensuring its road safety.
List of considerations
There were numerous aspects of this project that were outside of a freight Forwarder’s regular comfort zone, therefore UCARGO had to think and reflect on the various needs that would constitute an in-depth project forwarding bid.
“Our first consideration was, can we do this job? The conclusion that with our many partners, experience working in Saudi – and our ability to not shy away from a challenge, was yes,” says a company representative.
“We began by putting together the three facets of this project: number one was a review of equipment and how to make it roadworthy. Number two, maintenance, to put together a package that would accommodate replacement and repairs to the trailers and rides, and number three, arrange haulage – overnight on a 1000-kilometre journey in 40-degree heat. The other aspect was that a lot of this project was undertaken in Ramadan and so work was only permitted at night.”
UCARGO earlier this year outlined its plans to take on more clients, looking forward towards future opportunities as it celebrated a successful post-COVID performance.
