Author: Archive

An Post in EUR3m service deal

Posted by | Apr 23, 2007 | |

An Post has won a EUR3 million contract to provide direct marketing, mailing and billing services for a UK home shopping company.

The State postal company has signed a deal with Oxendale’s, one of the UK’s biggest home shopping and delivery companies, to provide it with a range of services in the Republic.

Oxendale’s customers order goods online or from catalogues.

An Post will deliver them, bill customers, distribute brochures and catalogues, and handle returns in the Republic for the British company.

An Post said yesterday that the new deal would be worth in the region of EUR3 million a year.

It won the contract against a number of pitches from a number of international carriers, including operators based in the UK.

The orders and deliveries will be managed through An Post’s main parcel delivery hub in Portlaoise, Co Laois.

An Post’s sales and marketing director, Liam Sheehan, said yesterday that the deal will be an important new business for An Post.

“Catalogue and e fulfilment are strong growth areas for An Post and improvements in delivery performance help our customers to sell more,” he said.

Oxendale’s managing director, Ronnie Coffey, said the company expected to post around 500,000 parcels through An Post over the next year.

Oxendale & Company Limited is a sister company to JD Williams & Company Limited, the UK’s leading direct home shopping company.

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Postwatch aims to get Royal Mail to deliver on its promises

Posted by | Apr 23, 2007 | |

Its immaculate cobbled crescents and scrubbed stone porches are typical of Edinburgh’s refined and orderly New Town. But the EH3 district – home to top law firms, foreign consulates and some of Europe’s most exclusive residential addresses – had Scotland’s highest number of complaints about its postal service last year.

In 2006, cumulative first-class next-day deliveries stood at 93.5 per cent for Edinburgh, 92.1 per cent for Dundee and 93.6 per cent for Glasgow for the first three-quarters of last year – all comfortably ahead of targets set by the regulator, Postcomm.

But all three lag behind Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Leeds, Cardiff, Nottingham and Sheffield. Only Aberdeen, with an impressive 95.6 per cent, drags Scotland up the league table.

Half of residents had their mail left in the hall or communal stairs at least once a week. One-third of all residents had lost items of mail, including credit cards, bank statements, chequebooks, concert tickets and medical test results. Many residents reported receiving no mail for several days, followed by a bundle in a red rubber band.

Even the Postwatch questionnaire itself fell victim to the problem: 12 per cent were not delivered until between four and eight working days after posting.

Royal Mail says the problems are down to the number of tenements in Edinburgh and Glasgow, many of which have no names on doors or main entrances which prevent access to delivery staff during the day.

Despite these challenges, performance in Edinburgh improved dramatically during 2006.

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USPS – Postal Service going private?

Posted by | Apr 23, 2007 | |

The U.S. Postal Service has intentions to increase the number of areas contracted out with independent delivery service operators.

Known as the Growth Management Program, the Postal Service is slowly allowing more delivery from private contracts, who would then subcontract employees to deliver mail in areas throughout the United States.

“We are concerned the American public will see a difference in service,” said William Young, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers.

While many people don’t have a relationship with their mail carrier, Young said there are many more concerns associated with the idea.

Safety issues, late mail, dedication and a carrier’s background are just a few of the issues that could affect the public if the Postal Service allows more privately contracted carriers.

But the Postal Service disagrees, saying the concept of contracting out within the department has always existed.

“Contracting new deliverymen is nothing new. We’ve been doing it since the beginning of the Postal Service,” said Richard Maher, USPS spokesman.

The increase in contract use however, comes from the growing number of addresses throughout the country.

This past year alone, there were 2 million new addresses, he said. But only about 10 percent of those are contracted.

Currently, about 2.5 percent of the country’s routes are handled by contract personnel. But Maher said this is just one type of delivery the Postal Service is considering.

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FedEx's brand recognized

Posted by | Apr 23, 2007 | |

FedEx’s value as a brand in 2007 was strong enough to rank it No. 69 among the top 100 Most Powerful Brands worldwide.
The list was compiled by research agency Millward Brown Optimor and is being published in today’s edition of the Financial Times.
Brand value is a function of consumer perceptions, which were determined through more than 1 million interviews, and a combination of business performance, product delivery, the clarity of product or service positioning and leadership, Millward Brown Optimor stated in a release.
Based in Memphis, package shipper FedEx Corp. had a brand value of USD 9.31 billion for 2007, an increase of 13 percent over 2006.
Topping the list was Google, with a brand value of USD 66.4 billion, a 77 percent increase from last year. Rounding out the top five were General Electric with a brand value of USD 61.8 billion; Microsoft, with USD 54.9 billion; Coca-Cola, with USD 54.9 billion; and China Mobile with USD 41.1 billion.

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DPD Masterlink introduces international service between Poland and Ireland

Posted by | Apr 23, 2007 | |

DPD Masterlink introduced a new international service between Poland and Ireland. The company offers 4-5 days time delivery at the net price of 99 PLN.

As a result of the migration of 100 to nearly 250 thousand Poles to Ireland, new market needs arose. These are being fulfilled by the creation of a friendly and cozy, local atmosphere. In Ireland you can not only read a Polish paper, but also buy a traditional Polish sausage and pickles.

Most Poles migrated from districts such as: podkarpacki, lubelski, opolski and warminsko-mazurski. People from these regions showed the biggest interest in the possibilities of sending parcels to their families in Ireland. DPD Masterlink in cooperation with the partner company Interlink in Ireland (also a member of the GeoPost Group), introduced a new, cheap international service. Parcels weighing up to 31,5 kilos can be sent to Ireland for only 99 PLN.

Delivery occurs within 4-5 days. The popularity of the new service as well as the number of sent parcels is growing.

Parcels can be sent to Ireland from all 50 DPD Masterlink depots in Poland.

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TNT Post threatens actions

Posted by | Apr 23, 2007 | |

The works council at TNT Post is threatening to block competitors’ locations with its trucks if Parliament does not agree to approve better labour conditions for postal workers on Tuesday.

The works council wants Parliament to adopt a motion from Ferd Crone (Labour PvdA) and Cynthia Ortega (ChristenUnie) on Tuesday, but it does not look so far as if the motion will get majority support.

State secretary for economic affairs Frank Heemskerk doesn’t think that better labour conditions should be provided for in the Post Office Act, as the motion on Tuesday proposes, but that unions and postal companies should be able to agree on conditions in negotiations.

Postal workers’ union BVPP warns Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende that failure to guarantee labour conditions for this group will lead to great social unrest.

The union fears that greater competition among postal companies, which will result if the Post Office Act is adopted, will lead to poor labour conditions for postal workers. Already over the past years many have been forced to agree to payment on the basis of pieces of post delivered rather than an hourly rate.
The amendment from PvdA and ChristenUnie would make it possible to force postal companies to pay an hourly wage if they fail to improve labour conditions.

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Spain's stock market reglatory body is taken to court

Posted by | Apr 23, 2007 | |

New regulations mean that Correos, the Spanish post office, will be penalised in the future if deliveries are late. The new rules demand that 93% of letters need to be delivered within three days of posting. In fact the plan will see a reduction in the grants paid by the Development Ministry to Correos, if the targets are not met.

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A Budding Network

Posted by | Apr 23, 2007 | |

The many hands–and connections –that go into overnight delivery
Information about the package is as important as the package itself.” I said that in 1978, five years after FedEx created the modern express industry. Please don’t misunderstand me. We care a lot about what’s inside the box, but the ability to track and trace shipments and thereby manage inventory in motion revolutionized logistics. Of course, back then I couldn’t have imagined what we’d be witnessing today: the vast and steady integration of the world’s economy into one giant interdependent global network.

Global integration is not a new phenomenon. It happened in the Roman era, over a network of roads; it happened during the Renaissance, when trading and merchant companies crisscrossed oceans; and it happened in the 19th century, with help from railroads and telegraphs. But today it’s happening faster than ever before and it means the dispersion of products and services of the widest breadth imaginable to every corner of the world.

We can now get our computer problems solved in minutes by a phone rep in India or get a same-day medical consultation by doctors in Tokyo, London and New York. And we can ship high-tech and high-value-added goods within one to two business days, door-to-door, virtually anywhere on the planet.

We couldn’t do any of this without complex information networks. FedEx spends roughly $1.5 billion a year on information technology. Some rough numbers will give you an idea of why. Every second of every day we have to handle 3,000 transactions, as well as 1,000 inquiries on the status of a package. Orders go out to 70,000 handheld devices carried by our couriers and contractors and millions of our customers’ desktops. Every day FedEx handles 6 million shipments around the globe. We have close to 7,000 people in IT overseeing what Rob Carter, our chief information officer, understatedly calls “an intense computing environment.”

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