A brighter place

Our amazing new facility in Warrington certainly helped us make our customers’ Christmas.

Strategically located just a stone’s throw from some of our biggest customers – including Amazon – the 32,000sqm facility provides much needed space to help colleagues deal with the rising demand for parcels, especially at our busiest time of year.

We plan to turn the site into one of three fully-automated parcels hubs as part of our ‘turnaround and grow’ plans to extend our network and win in parcels.

The new space opened in the summer and replaced the former North West Regional Distribution Centre. It is larger than four football pitches laid together. During Peak, the team processes up to 400,000 parcels a shift, in comparison to the usual 100,000.

Plant manager Eddie Douglas (pictured) says its size has changed the way colleagues work.

‘Before it was about how much stuff we could get into a very constricted space,’ he said. ‘Now we’re asking how efficiently can we use this space? You’re not adapting an old layout – you’re actually building a layout that works from scratch.

‘It’s completely changed the way our people work. We used to focus on processing bags of letters. Now, it’s all about processing parcels onto conveyor belts.’

All this has been considered in the design of the facility – lorries unload parcels on one side, where they are sorted on conveyor belts before being shuttled across to the other side. Then, a further fleet of lorries delivers these parcels to their final destinations.

Mail processor Solomon Jesupatam said: ‘We were fully prepared for Peak.’

Late shift manager Tom Dower added: ‘The flow of mail has altered – it’s now a lot more efficient. The old building was like a maze. Since we’ve moved you can see the change in colleague morale. It’s a brighter place.’