‘In the post’ this week with strategic developments, new services and operational activities arethe UPU, Canada Post, USPS, Correos de Mexico, PostNL and Deutsche Post DHL.
In Asia, the Universal Postal Union (UPU) is appealing to member countries to contribute to itsEmergency and Solidarity Fund so postal services cut off by Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines canbe re-established. “With the funds collected, the UPU plans to concentrate its efforts onrebuilding the main post office in Tacloban, a city that was hit very hard and was, before thedisaster, the transportation hub in the region,” says Abdel Ilah Bousseta, the UPU’s director ofdevelopment cooperation. “Donations will be used to rebuild the post office, and also to buy postalvehicles.” Philippines Post estimates the cost of damage to some 192 buildings at about US$500,000.“We are asking for the UPU’s financial support in rebuilding our postal infrastructure andre-establishing our postal services,” said Mama S. Lalanto, PhlPost’s assistant postmaster generalfor operations.
In North America, the head of Canada Post has defended the postal operator’s recently-announcedradical plan to eliminate all home deliveries of mail over the next five years, reduce jobs andraise prices. CEO Deepak Chotra told a three-hour parliamentary committee meeting that the changesto the business model were necessary in order for the carrier to survive and would help theoperator concentrate more on packages in future. He stressed the operator had consulted widelybefore unveiling the plan and also commented that senior citizens would benefit from the extraexercise of walking to collect their letters from community mailboxes in future.
Meanwhile, Mexican postal operator Correos de Mexico has signed a cooperation agreement with DHLExpress to use the express operator’s global delivery network for outbound shipments. Thepartnership is part of the Mexican operator’s ongoing modernisation programme.
In a product enhancement, the US Postal Service said it is now offering free online tracking forlightweight international packages to selected countries to add visibility to low-cost shippingservices. Customers can check when their package left the US, was received in the foreign countryand was delivered (or attempted to deliver) at the final destination address. The service coversFirst-Class Package International Service, Priority Mail International Flat Rate Envelopes, andPriority Mail International Small Flat Rate to major European markets, Canada, Australia, NewZealand and Brazil.
In Europe, PostNL is helping retailers to build Magento-based webshops through a partnershipwith three specialised e-commerce firms, Experius (Utrecht), MediaCT (Groningen and Amsterdam) andTotal Internet Group (Amsterdam). Magento webshops easily can be linked to existing logisticalinfrastructures, after which PostNL will process the order in optimal fashion. This allows PostNLto offer even more added value in addition to its current services such as order fulfilment, onlinedelivery service and return solutions. The Dutch postal operator has also decided to migrate itsentire IT environment to the ‘cloud’. PostNL has selected Dutch firm ICT Automatisering to migratea considerable proportion of the existing .NET environment to the Public Cloud by 2015 and assumeresponsibility for its management.
Meanwhile, Deutsche Post has published a trend report on ‘big data in logistics’ which predictsthat logistics companies could become the “search engines of the real world”. The report focuses onthree areas of application for data analysis – operational efficiency, customer experience and newbusiness models – and includes concrete examples that could be applied in practice. The aim in thefield of operational efficiency is the real time optimisation of package delivery routes takinginto account the order of delivery, the traffic situation and the availability of the recipient.The ability to predict delays in the supply chain, followed by the appropriate logistical serviceresponse, allows for an improved customer experience. Finally, big data offers logistics providersideas for new business models, for example the analysis of correlations between weather conditions,outbreaks of flu and the online purchases of consumers.
