Yodel said it has cleared a massive backlog of parcels that forced it to suspend pick-ups fromsome retailers last week and has today resumed full collections, although delivery delays will
continue for a few more days.The British parcel firm stopped collecting parcels from some customers last Wednesday aftersoaring Black Friday and Cyber Monday online sales generated an unexpected surge in volumes thatoverwhelmed its capacity. Volumes were more than 26% more than expected on some days.
Instead, the firm used the last few days to reduce the backlog as much as possible bytransporting parcels to its sorting centres and delivering them to customers without having newadditional volumes fill up its network.
Yodel said yesterday: “We can confirm that the parcel backlog in our central sorting facilitieshas been cleared and these parcels are now in our network of local service centres for deliverybetween Monday and Wednesday this week (15 – 17 December). This follows the deferment of someadditional consignment collections from our clients last Thursday and Friday, which enabled us touse this weekend to process the outstanding parcels which had come in since Black Friday / CyberMonday.”
The firm added: “As planned, scheduled collections of parcels from our clients into our centralsorts will resume in full, on Monday (15 December). New parcels entering the Yodel network maystill be subject to a 24-48 hour delay which is reflective of normal Christmas peakoperations.”
Yodel emphasised that it had liaised closely with its retail clients and now expects a slowdownin the number of consignments to be sorted over the next week. “This means that parcel volumes willbe at the levels originally forecast, and that the Yodel Christmas network was designed to handle.We will be closely monitoring this situation to ensure that all parcels are out for delivery beforeChristmas.”
The firm concluded: “We apologise to everyone who has been impacted by the backlog, which wasdue to higher than expected parcel volumes, and we are pleased to confirm that these parcels willbe delivered over the next three days.”
Yodel, which originally expected to handle 15% more parcels during the current peak season, hadalready taken on 5,000 temporary staff, extended working hours at sorting centres and set up 13temporary sites in addition to its existing 60 depots to increase its network capacity.
The company delivers some 145 million parcels a year for 85% of top retailers in the UK,including Amazon, Argos and Tesco.
