Business Express invests £63 million
Business Express has invested £55m in its Shaw sorting centre and £8m on a new track and trace system. Using the new Beumer system 150,000 items a day pass through the site, estimated to reach 232,000 a day from September.
The system went live in June with figures reaching 12000 items per hour and 1.5 million parcels per week. This represents an increase of six times the amount of parcels in a manual sort in the same time frame. Managing director Mick Janicki said: ‘Out of every parcel we take out, 99.7 per cent are on the vehicle to the doorstep every morning.”
At the Shaw centre, goods go on a conveyor belt through an automatic scanner which tells each tray which loading bay the parcel is for, so that it tips when it reaches its destination. After the parcels are sorted they drop into one of 33 area chutes and are loaded into trucks for onward delivery.
Mr Janicki said if the product is small, less staff are needed as the machine does all the sorting. Everything on the conveyor is a specific size and weight of 3x2x2ft and a maximum of 25 kilos.
Larger goods are manually sorted on the ground floor by a specifically trained team, part of the total 340 staff employed at the centre.
The track and trace facility shows packages through their whole journey, cumulating in an electronic signature for recorded delivery.
Mr Janicki said: “We’ve got to get into the situation where we can indicate a rough time window when we’re going to be in the area which will happen through track and trace. We’ll get a data base that says we’re always in these areas am and pm so customers will have some indication.”
Mr Janicki said Business
Express has started evening delivery trials at its Rochdale depot, and when evening delivery becomes popular he wants to leave a card saving: “We called today and you weren’t home. Don’t worry, we are coming back tonight. That’s where I want to get my business to. I think the future’s about understanding whether there’s a need for am/pm choices, evening delivery, six working days, all of which are on the radar for trailing in the future.”
Another issue is European deliveries since new orders are coming via the web. He said: “We want to provide a service to get the parcel wherever it needs to be, to people’s homes not into the high-street.”
