Edited summary of visit note 7 September
BTB Mailflight
Edited summary of visit note 7 September
1. Results
Results had not been very good. There we two causes:-
The loss of a large customer, The Lancet. This had been made part of a tender invitation to handle all Elsevier’s output. TNT, who handled most of the publisher’s other output had also won The Lancet, despite the fact that it is an independent publishing group.
There had been investment in strengthening management and in new services and product offerings.
2. Outlook
Management is by no means pessimistic regarding the future. He thought that business lost on price might well be won back because TNT and other large operators did not offer the individual service provided by BTB. He was also optimistic that the investment in the past years would start to generate profits.
3. Staffing.
A Human Resources Director had been appointed and training and staff development initiatives were under way. The business was slowly being divided into three operating divisions and Division Heads are in place for two of these.
4. Response Handling and Fulfilment.
Considerable investment had been made in modern IT systems covering all aspects of the ‘chain’ and one of the major developments had been to establish strong competencies in response handling, coupon redemption and offer fulfilment services. They have 100k sq ft of warehousing for customer stocks and use Royal Mail, Parcelforce, TNT and UPS as deliverers. They have not established a full call centre but plan to develop cash handling capability in the coming months.
5. Postcomm
The Managing Director has been co-opted onto a working party to look at competition. He favours downstream access and would use third party carriers to achieve this. He sees the fact that Consignia ‘do not know what their costs are’ as a major impediment and hopes that Postcomm will force Consignia them to behave rationally in pricing downstream access.
6. Liberalised Markets
The managing director thinks that other delivery services will develop and that the domestic ‘mailhouse’ business will be similar to the international consolidators/brokers (but with greater volumes). He acknowledged that he end users are not yet recognising and planning for this..
7. International Mail
At present BTB ‘co-load’ with Pharos to get maximum discounts from RMI. They are using all of the mainstream International Post Offices to get the best rates.
