Stockport soars

Improving our quality of service is one of the business’s top priorities for 2024.

At Stockport Delivery Office, a large four-COM unit made up of around 200 colleagues covering 139 deliveries across six postcode areas, they’ve taken that challenge seriously.

In period nine last year, Stockport were working at a delivery loss of 59.46%.

By period two of this year, they had reduced that figure to just 8.45%.

So how have they done it?

In early 2024, the OPL role for Stockport was taken up by Anna Limbert.

Kelly-Marie Bannon, a high-achieving manager from Anna’s previous unit, put her herself forward for the task of improving Stockport’s cost and quality performance under Anna’s watchful eye.

‘Stockport is a high-impacting unit, and the USO clearance and the finances needed immediate improvement ,’ says Kelly.

‘When I arrived at the unit, I spent the first week observing the working practices on the floor and the tools the managers were using to do their tasks.

‘I noticed that the tools available to us to work efficiently were either not being used or the managers had a limited knowledge of them.’

Kelly therefore started to upskill the managers, helping them to understand how to use prep-plans and other processes to maximise the unit’s efficiency.

‘We addressed the walk spans on some of the problematic deliveries with a view to balancing them out more fairly,’ she says. 

‘We quickly implemented a process of “getting back to basics” and put a standards re-set in place.

‘If prep plans are right, and you display your prep plans, everyone knows what they are doing and it releases time for managers to look after customers. That really helps everyone.

‘We also have stars of the week, praise people when they do a great job and we engage people – having conversations every day during Team talk: take 5 and discussing how we think we can improve.

‘Overall I just make sure we are using all the tools that are available to us to the best advantage. For example Automis, forecasting tools and prep plans.

‘Yes we have dramatically improved in just a few months,’ says Kelly. ‘But this was a full team effort and we could not have done it without the other managers being engaged to improve and the fantastic work force in the office.

‘To me it’s all about full transparency with everyone, people know what is going on in the unit and work as a team to try fix it. That helps morale too .’