ABOUT
Named for the wind
Upepo is Swahili for wind. The name comes from where this practice began, in East Africa, and from what wind does. You never see it. You see what it moves: barley bending across a field, a sail filling, smoke leaving a chimney at an angle.
A good supply chain works the same way. Nobody sees it whole, but you can tell at once whether it is moving. Product leaves the yard on time, invoices go out the same day, cash comes back, and the next load is already planned. When it stops, everyone feels it, and the cost spreads quietly through every line of the accounts.
WHO I AM
Who I am
I am Hugo Armstrong. I learned logistics as a Royal Navy logistics officer with 845 Naval Air Squadron, Navy Command and HMS Kent, where a missing part is not an inconvenience but an aircraft that does not fly. I then worked in enterprise supply chain consulting at Infosys, and ran food and nutrition logistics from Nairobi for the Centre for Humanitarian Change, getting food where it was needed on bad roads, at short notice and on tight budgets.
UPEPO was built in Kenya, alongside growers, processors and exporters. The work there took fourteen per cent out of a pig business's cost of production, cut a horticulture exporter's spoilage by nine per cent and released eleven per cent of a nut wholesaler's working capital. Since bringing the practice home to the UK, I have been applying the same method to food and farming businesses across the North of England and Scotland, and it is producing the same kind of results.
I still take on humanitarian and development work in East Africa. Commercial supply chains have spent decades learning to cut cost, waste and delay, because their margins depend on it. Aid supply chains rarely get the same scrutiny, and with funding falling they need it more than ever. I bring what works in the private sector to agencies and projects that have to make every tonne count.
I hold the CSCP (Certified Supply Chain Professional) from ASCM and a CILT qualification in humanitarian logistics.
I work alone. The person who scopes the work is the person who does it, from the first visit to the last page of the report.
BACKGROUND
Royal Navy
Infosys
Centre for Humanitarian Change
UPEPO Consulting
Logistics officer
Enterprise supply chain consulting
Food & Nutrition Logistics, Nairobi
Founder and director
UK & KENYA
QUALIFICATIONS · CSCP, Certified Supply Chain Professional (ASCM) · CILT, Humanitarian Logistics
THE IDEA
Why flow matters
Every business runs on flows: product, cash, information and people's time. When they move together, the business feels light. Orders become deliveries, deliveries become invoices, invoices become cash, and nobody has to chase. When one of them catches, the others back up behind it. Stock piles up in the shed. Cash sits in debtors. A decision waits on a report someone is rebuilding by hand.
Most of the margin a food or farming business loses is lost at those catches, between buying an input and being paid for the output: in haulage, stock, spoilage, planning, and the prices one part of a group charges another. It rarely shows on a single line of the accounts, which is why it lasts. My work is to find where the flow catches, put a figure on what it costs, and help the people who run the business free it.
Three commitments follow.
Every finding carries a value and an owner. If I cannot size something, it does not go in front of you.
The work builds an evidence base. What a mile of livestock haulage costs, what a tonne of feed costs to deliver, where spoilage really starts. I publish it in Field Notes, with client names removed, so the next business does not start from nothing.
The link between the UK and East Africa stays open. Some clients export to Europe and the Gulf; others import from producers who must now prove where their goods come from. I have worked at both ends of those chains.
WAYS OF WORKING
How I work
One fee, agreed before work starts.
No day rates, no retainers, no hours that creep.
The diagnosis comes first.
I am paid to find the problem, not to guess at it. The diagnostic is the sensible place to start, not a condition of working together.
Your numbers, not industry averages.
Every figure is built from your own records and reconciled to your accounts.
Tested on the yard floor.
Nothing goes in a report until it has survived a conversation with the person who does the job.
THE COMPANY
UPEPO Consulting Limited, registered in England and Wales, company number 17374080. Registered office: Melrose House, The Parade, Sandsend, Whitby YO21 3SZ.