Royal Mail has announced a major investment of £130 million in hand-held technology to improve itsparcel tracking capabilities and has unveiled its Christmas peak season planning.
The British postal group said it will spend around £130 million over five years in hand-heldtechnology to provide more flexible delivery for customers and better tracking capability. Theinvestment means Royal Mail will begin rolling out around 76,000 next generation hand-held devicesto postmen and women in 2015. The roll-out is expected to be completed in the 2016/17 financialyear.
Through its Field Force Automation services, BT will work with Royal Mail to decide whichhand-held device to deploy. The contract with BT also covers the day-to-day management of thecurrent and new devices and operating platform for a five-year period. Royal Mail’s mobileconnectivity is provided by BT under an existing, separate contract.
The investment is part of its budgeted expenditure and ongoing IT transformation programme,a key objective of which is to support the delivery of the parcels strategy. Within the investment,Royal Mail expects to finalise a contract in the coming weeks for the supply of softwareapplications for the devices.
The benefits will include more flexible delivery for customers not at home when the companyattempts to deliver a parcel, e.g, by enabling customers to provide information about a safelocation to leave the item. Improved management information and enhanced tracking for parcelscustomers will be gained by adding information-rich barcodes to shipping labels.
Earlier this year, Royal Mail launched a new parcels shipping and tracking platform toenable e-retailers to improve integration between their IT systems and Royal Mail. This summer,Royal Mail also made its Local Collect ‘click and collect’ service with Post Offices available toits 20,000 SME contract customers.
Nick Landon, Managing Director of Royal Mail Parcels, said: “We are delighted to announceour investment of around £130 million in IT which will better enable us to develop new services forparcels customers. This is part of our on-going programme to continue to respond to the needs ofour customers and maintain our leading position in the UK parcels market.”
Meanwhile, Royal Mail is opening 10 temporary parcel sort centres across the UK for theexpected Christmas rush for the fourth consecutive year. The centres will sort a significantproportion of the parcels Royal Mail handles during the busy Christmas period before they aredistributed around the UK and delivered to the door.
The parcel sort centres are in Bathgate in West Lothian, Leeds, Middleton in GreaterManchester, Llantrisant in South Wales, Swindon, Greenford, Peterborough, Wolverhampton and MiltonKeynes. There will also be an international parcel sort centre based at Heathrow. All centres willopen on a phased basis from 3rd November with around 4,000 seasonal workers.
In parallel, Royal Mail has launched a drive to recruit around 19,000 temporary workers tohelp sort the Christmas mailbag between mid-November and early January 2015. The peak of theadditional temporary work will be in December. The majority of seasonal positions will supportRoyal Mail’s permanent 124,000 postmen and women who sort and deliver the mail all year round.Royal Mail Group’s express parcels business, Parcelforce Worldwide, is also recruiting 2,000 extrapeople throughout the UK.
Royal Mail’s chief operations officer, Sue Whalley, said: “Christmas is the busiest time ofthe year for Royal Mail and we plan all year round to help ensure we deliver the best possibleservice to our customers. Every Christmas, we make a substantial financial commitment in additionalresources to handle the festive mailbag, including the recruitment of thousands of temporaryworkers.”
