Polish Post and Itella win “biggest ever” mail contract in Poland
Polish Post and partners including Itella Poland have signed the “biggest contract in the history of the postal services market” in Poland – handling the nation’s parking tickets and speeding fines. The company is part of a consortium that has won an eight-year, PLN 353.2m (EUR 88.3m) contract to provide mailing services for Poland’s Main Inspectorate of Road Transport (GITD), the road traffic enforcement agency attached to the State Treasury.
The consortium also includes telecoms company PTK Centertel, operator of the Orange brand in Poland.
Polish Post – Poczta Polska – said the contract won through a full tender process is the biggest single mail contract ever in Poland by value, and will involve the printing, finishing, manual and digital archiving and delivery of correspondence on behalf of the government’s road transport regulator.
The state-owned postal operator said the contract win was a big boost for its efforts to strengthen its position in the business mail market ahead of January’s full liberalisation of the Polish postal market.
Łukasz Gołębiowski, the director of business and institutional clients at Polish Post, said the deal showed that Polish Post’s restructuring had left it fully capable to challenge for the market once it is full open for rivals to compete.
He said: “The signing of this contract signals that on the eve of liberalisation of the postal services market, we can offer attractive prices combined with a high service quality, as measured in the postal and logistics business with the use of indicators for timely and accurate deliveries.”
Contract
The GITD contract is set to begin this month, and will involve correspondence including speeding tickets and other notices of road traffic violations, official receipts and other communications from the agency, along with the return of key documents and scanning of data contained within returned items.
The contract will also involve the management of electronic fees for using toll roads.
Polish Post, which said its consortium beat rivals to the contract through favourable prices and service efficiency promises, said its contract for GITD would include innovative and customer-friendly services that reduce the complexity of its client’s operations.
Itella, the Finnish postal operator, said it was expecting the contract to deliver an increased level of automation for the handling of the GITD’s correspondence.
Warsaw-based Itella Information Poland is providing expertise in transactional processes – both paper and electronic channels – for the consortium, the company said, along with international expertise. The company will collect and prepare documents sent out and received by GITD and digitise them using optical character recognition (OCR) technology.
Polish Post will be responsible for the printing and delivery of physical documents.
The Finnish company said it was expecting to process around 900,000 documents of various types each month on the contract.
Miikka Savolainen, the Itella Information Poland managing director, said: “We are happy to be a member of the consortium and to have the opportunity to contribute to this prestigious project. We are sure we can add value to the process with our expert knowledge, long-term experience and high-end technology.”
