Growing parcel volumes

A major UK transformation plan sits at the heart of our overall strategy. Our ambition is to build a parcels-led, more balanced, more diversified international business.

We will extend our UK network to handle next-day and large parcels, which are significant growth areas, more efficiently than we do today. 

We will focus on improving our productivity through operational excellence, new digitally-enabled work tools and a major increase in parcels automation. We’re also going to roll out major new parcels initiatives for customers and e-retailers. This is a large and demanding change plan and will be carefully sequenced over five years. 

Play the RMtv video above to hear Simon Barker, national operations director, tell us more about the plan and what the initiatives will mean for colleagues in Process.

‘I think within the Process environment it’s really exciting,’ said Simon. ‘We’re introducing a lot of new equipment that will make everyone’s jobs easier to do. The way we process mail will change but it won’t be fundamentally different.

‘What we will be doing is automating more parcels. We currently have around 12% of parcels automated, our ambition is to get as close to 100% as possible and remove a lot of the hard labour tasks from mail centres.

‘We can sort directly to 200-300 delivery sort points, which will then go out on van delivery. But what it also means is, for the smaller parcels, we can take time out of the network for our Tracked product and ensure we feedback into our existing delivery office estate in a timely manner with more information.

‘We’re always going to need committed, dedicated colleagues in our mail centres even as we introduce automation. This is about winning and growing in volume and providing good, sustainable, high quality jobs for the future.’