Royal Mail land technological excellence award

Royal Mail has scooped Gartner’s inaugural Wireless & Mobile Excellence Award.

Royal Mail has scooped Gartner’s inaugural Wireless & Mobile Excellence Award.

The accolade, which honours an enterprise that most clearly demonstrates excellence in their wireless and mobile initiatives, was presented during the annual Gartner Wireless & Mobile Summit, held in Chicago on 25 February.

Companies submitted their applications for the Gartner Wireless & Mobile Excellence Award based on how an organisation delivered business value, technical implementation and best practices in their wireless initiatives.

Gartner’s wireless & mobile research analysts evaluated the applicants and selected three finalists [Royal Mail, Anthony Marano Company, Coca Cola Enterprises] who presented their case studies at the Wireless & Mobile Summit.

Attendees then voted to select the award winner, with Royal Mail prevailing with its ‘Operations Transformation Programme’.

Helping their customers take advantage of the home shopping and e-Retail market using Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), Royal Mail were judged to be the key innovators by the panel.

To give an idea of the scale of the programme, in the space of just 12 weeks, the postal company configured 260,000 components and upgraded more than 25,000 of their vehicles. Furthermore, Royal Mail impressed the judges by having more than 35,000 personnel trained to use the PDA systems, whilst having 500 people working with 11 suppliers to implement and maintain an efficient operation across the board.

Royal Mail invested millions of pounds into new automated plant and claims to have 150m items tracked every year, making it the largest postal transformation of its type in Europe.

Speaking exclusively to Triangle Management Services, Clive Boddington, head of programmes at Royal Mail said: “Everyone has worked together to make the project a winner and everyone can take credit in this prestigious international award. Our field workers in particular have played a major role, with a ‘unit champion’ in every office trained to use the kit – and then sharing that knowledge with their colleagues. The whole business has played a role in this success.”

Commercial director Alex Smith added: “The award is proof that we can use technology to increase commercial opportunities and improve operational performance.”