Year: 2008

Postal workers return in Oxfordshire

Posted by | Jan 5, 2008 | |

Postal workers in Oxfordshire returned to work this morning but union leaders are warning it could be Friday before any mail is delivered.

Communication Workers Union representative Bob Cullen said there was a backlog of “millions and millions” of letters and parcels at the Oxford Mail Centre in Cowley.

As a result, staff who would normally be delivering mail have been called in to help with the mass sorting operation.

Mr Cullen said: “The problem is that it is not just mail backed up in the system – the public and businesses have been told to hold back until today and there is going to be a deluge of new mail.”

Meanwhile, postal workers in the Liverpool and Glasgow areas refused to go back to work today and there are fears the wildcat action could spread nationally.

The situation is also likely to remain chaotic next week with strike action staggered across the service on different days.

Talks over pay, jobs and pensions remain deadlocked, although the CWU claims there has been significant movement.

But Royal Mail chief executive Adam Crozier fuelled the flames by claiming Royal Mail staff was paid 25 per cent more than workers in rival post firms.

He added that other companies in the business were 40 per cent more efficient, which is why the Royal Mail wanted a long-term solution to the current dispute to help it compete more effectively.

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Canada Post: Judge OKs class action suit over postal charges

Posted by | Jan 5, 2008 | |

Canada Post could be required to return tens of millions of dollars in shipping charges to thousands of businesses as a result of a recent Ontario court ruling.

Superior Court Justice Joan Lax certified a class-action proceeding initiated by Ottawa-based Lee Valley Tools Ltd., which has been embroiled in a long-running dispute with the Crown corporation about its charges for shipping parcels to customers.

The ruling noted there are more than 57,000 commercial clients that could have a claim against Canada Post, if its billing practices for parcels are found to violate the federal Weights and Measures Act.

For the past seven years, Canada Post has charged customers to ship parcels based on the greater charge of the actual weight or the “volumetric weight” of an item. This is so that the charges on lightweight yet bulky items cover the cost of transportation.

Since 2003, the Crown corporation has used a device known as a “cubiscan,” which Lee Valley has alleged can overstate the volume of objects, especially irregularly shaped parcels, by as much as 20 per cent.

Commercial clients are required to pre-pay and weigh their products and if Canada Post determines that the total was underestimated, it levies an addition charge. Until January 2007, it did not refund any overpayments to customers.

John Caines, a spokesman for Canada Post, described the class-action certification as a “procedural” ruling. “We deal with all of our customers fairly and in the same way,” Mr. Caines said. “This is the way the industry measures parcels.” He added that Canada Post is the only company now issuing credits for overpayments.

Enforcement of the Weights and Measures Act is the responsibility of Measurement Canada, part of Industry Canada. Alan Johnston, president of Measurement Canada, responded in December 2005 that the relevant section of the Act did not define a “proscribed limit of error” for shipping charges, so it could not be enforced.

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La Poste entrusts Bull to host its digital postmark application

Posted by | Jan 4, 2008 | |

La Poste entrusts Bull to host its digital postmark application.
The French Post Office Group (La Poste) has renewed the outsourcing contract for its digital postmark application for the second year running.

Customer issue

The digital equivalent of the traditional postmark, the digital postmark enables proof of an electronic event to be set up and managed (issuing identity, date and time stamping, data integrity), this proof being legally upholdable to a third party. In essence, the postmark uses specially adapted cryptographic mechanisms to enable basic questions about an electronic event to be answered: WHO initiated the event? WHEN did the event’s author create, see, sign, receive, etc? WHAT is the content of the digital event?

The ‘Digital postmark’, with its signature validation authority and date stamping authority functionality, enables the French Post Office to position itself in France as trusted third party in digital data exchanges.

Bull provided

Developed by Bull, this application is hosted and monitored 24/7 at Bull’s high security production centre. It is based on a replicated architecture distributed across ten Bull NovaScale Universal servers. It was designed in n-tier mode (portal, applications server, database server) and a J2EE environment built around the JOnAS application server developed by the OW2/ObjectWeb consortium, dedicated to Open Source middleware. The application conforms to DPM (Digital Postmark) standards drawn up by the Universal Postal Union (UPU), a United Nations agency responsible for standardizing exchanges between the different postal networks.

Bull’s contribution fulfills the requirements of La Poste:
• Very high service quality
• Capacity to handle a rapid rise in throughput
• Minimal timescales for restoring systems in the event of a major incident.

Web Site http://www.laposte.fr

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Hermes Logistik eyes acquisition in Spain

Posted by | Jan 4, 2008 | |

Hermes Logistik is considering an acquisition in Spain and potentially elsewhere to strengthen its European B2C network, according to the company’s management.

Managing director Hanjo Schneider told the Deutsche Verkehrs-Zeitung (DVZ) that in Spain the Otto Group subsidiary was seeking “a solution in the next 12 – 18 months”. The Spanish B2C market is currently at an early stage of development, according to experts.

Hermes currently covers five countries, representing about 85 pct of the European B2C market, through its own network, Schneider said. The UK and France are served by Otto Group subsidiaries Parcelnet and Mondial Relay, while Hermes started operations in Austria in summer 2007.

In Italy, Hermes bought a 30 pct holding in Porta a Porta, which is majority-owned by Swiss Post, in October 2007. The Swiss postal group, however, might be prepared to split off the Italian company’s parcels distribution business, and sell it to Hermes completely, whilst retaining the mail and logistics activities, the DVZ reported.

Hermes currently uses partners to deliver to other European destinations. TNT covers the Benelux area, Swiss Post covers Switzerland, and DPD is used for all other markets.

French sister company Mondial Relay last year announced plans to expand into Belgium, Spain and Portugal, while British operator Parcelnet grew with the acquisition of the Redcats courier network last spring.

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Special Delivery: Bringing SMBs into the Global Shipping Network

Posted by | Jan 4, 2008 | |

“Each carrier has tools to make international shipping easier. DHL calls its ‘Trade Automation Services.’ UPS’ international tool is named ‘TradeAbility.’ FedEx has its Trade Network. You will have to register in order to access these tools, and some carriers charge a transaction fee for providing a service,” Mark Taylor, chief logistics officer at RedRoller.com told the E-Commerce Times.

The parcel carriers have been a huge factor driving the globalization of commerce, Taylor agreed.

“First, they see this as a high priority in their own growth and success,” he continued. “We can see this from some public statements from their CEOs. Mike Eskew, chairman and chief executive officer of United Parcel Service informs us, ‘Most of our 8 million daily customers at UPS are small businesses.

It turns out that small businesses make up 97 percent of all exporters and nearly 40 percent of exports’ total value, statistics pointed out by FedEx CEO Fred Smith, said Taylor.

“Second, international shipping is where their bread is buttered. Donald Broughton, an analyst who follows both UPS and FedEx for A.G. Edwards & Sons in St. Louis, tells us ‘Direct international is 23 percent of revenue for FedEx, but it’s the fastest growing part of their business, and it’s almost 20 percent for UPS. FedEx is the largest air freight carrier in Asia and UPS is neck-and-neck with DHL in Europe,'” he said.

UPS provides package delivery services to 21 of the top 25 e-tailers in the U.S. as ranked by Internet Retailer magazine, according to Donna Barrett, the company’s technology public relations manager. Tracking requests on UPS.com along average 15 million a day.

There have been more than 25,000 distinct integrations within the last 18 months of UPS Online Tools, which retailers can integrate into their Web sites, Barrett told the E-Commerce Times. These have enabled more than 748,000 individual users to access tracking, time-in-transit, rating and shipping information.

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Italy's post office

Posted by | Jan 4, 2008 | |

Now might not be a great time to launch a financial services stock, but Italy’s national postal service — led by its booming banking unit — is gearing up for a float.

Having rewritten its history as a lethargic administration that could barely be trusted to deliver a letter in time, the post office was valued this year by investment banks at as much as 15 billion euros, said Sarmi. He declined to say which banks had provided the estimate.

That would make it Italy’s third-largest retail bank by market value at current share prices and is 50 percent higher than the estimated value Sarmi cited for the postal group more than a year ago.

And while billions have been wiped off banks’ market value globally by their loans to ‘subprime’ borrowers, analysts say the post office — which in a float would offer shares to both domestic and foreign investors — is a banking story that has succeeded by betting on the simple and safe.

Key to Poste Italiane’s business model has been a strategy of using its 14,000 outlets across Italy to offer bank accounts and loans, exploiting its reputation as a conservative player that has catered to pensioners and families for decades.

In 2006, about 67 percent of Poste Italiane’s revenue came from ventures outside mail.
“It’s not an exciting business but it’s profitable,” said Vetulli.

Poste Italiane has joined a broader trend of postal groups diversifying out of the low-margin mail business into more lucrative segments, as the rise of the Internet and email challenge the concept of traditional mail.

With banking also using electronic networks, postal groups have found it relatively easy to branch out — capitalising on numerous outlets that give them a market position other retail operators can only dream of, and an image of reliability.

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Poste Italiane and Bull – case study

Posted by | Jan 4, 2008 | |

Customer issue

The Italian Post wanted to upgrade the IT infrastructure and re-organise the 14,000 post offices, decentralized over the country, to better respond to the new market requirements. The main business issues were:

– Delivery of customer services was very limited, causing end users dissatisfaction.
– Employee productivity did not meet the objectives.
– Late and insufficient information reporting

The Italian Post objective was to equip each post office with dedicated workstations able to run initially the accounting and mail/parcels management applications.

Bull provided

Bull was in charge of the global Project Management, being responsible of the logistic operations including reception, delivery and deployment of the IT equipment to the Post Offices network. In particular Bull was responsible for :
– Site preparation, including electrical equipment supply and installations
– LAN cabling projects for the 14,000 offices
– Hot staging HW/SW of MVS desktops
– Equipment roll out including agency PC’s, 14,000 monitors, 1,300 ZDS servers, and 14,000 printers
– Deployment of the client-server architecture, based on Windows NT

Web Site – http://www.poste.it

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TNT to offer print management after TDG tie-up

Posted by | Jan 4, 2008 | |

TNT Post is offering print management services to its clients after signing a 12-month agreement with TDG Group.

The private-sector rival to Royal Mail will use the tie-up with the London-based firm to offer end-to-end print management services, a creative review process and environmental consultancy to direct mail clients. It will also use TDG’s services for its own print.

TNT’s agreement makes it the latest postal operator to offer some form of print management. Most notable among those who have moved into the market is Deutsche Post World Net, which in February 2006 bought a controlling stake in Williams Lea.

TNT Post has recently launched an initiative to cut its carbon emissions and TDG is hoping it can help, having recently been awarded ISO 14001 environmental management accreditation. It also has the ISO 9001 quality management stamp.

“With this agreement, we can advise TNT’s clients on how to be greener and open up a creative delivery to ensure they maximise their demands,” said Tom Gorman, TDG managing director. He added that he hoped to increase turnover from GBP 6m to GBP 8m in 2008.

A spokeswoman for TNT Post said the firm had worked with TDG in the past and the renewed link was “a great opportunity” for the firm. The group had formalised the relationship after TDG, which has recently launched a green audit for suppliers, stepped up its environmental focus.

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