Householders might have to wait until the afternoon to get letters under plans being considered by Consignia to save money. Consignia is weighing the idea of giving priority to businesses over residential customers.
Read MoreLittlewoods has awarded TDG a £15 million-pound fulfilment contract, servicing the retailer’s new channels to market. Littlewoods required a storage and picking facility for customer orders from catalogue and television shopping channels that was accessible to its main distribution hub at Shaw, Lancashire. The contract utilises 200,000 sq ft of space at TDG’s 450,000 sq ft muIti-contract facility in Wrexham.
Read Moresexylingerie.co.uk, online lingerie retailer, has awarded iNet Distribution on Leamington a contract to distnbute its products. Steven Begley, cofounder of sexylingerie.co.uk, says, the company was growing at such a fast rate that we needed to either set up our own warehouse or use a third party. We chose to use iNet because they made things so easy for us, taking away the hassle of set-up costs, staffing and leasing.
Read MoreThe editorial writers of the Financial Times have written that “if the Royal Mail, or Consignia as it now prefers to be known, provided a quality service, there would be little need to consider big changes this week in the market for delivering letters. Consignia does not provide such a service. It has failed to achieve its first-class mail delivery target in each of the past six years. Its 200,000 employees are responsible for more strikes than any other industry. It made its first operating loss last year….Consignia’s recent failures cannot be blamed on the gradual introduction of competition at the margins of its monopoly. And it is absurd to suggest that because Consignia is so bad, competition should be avoided.”
Read MoreBUSINESS EXPRESS , the delivery subsidiary of the Littlewoods Group (Littlewoods Stoics, Index Stores. Index Extra Catalogue and Littlewods Catalogues) was handling up to 400,000 parcels a day through the hub during the peak pre-Christmas period. The system is housed in a 39,000 sq m building within a large marshalling area. It handles both bulk products in callous and small parcelled items. At present, about 80 percent of the traffic is from Littlewoods and the remainder from third party clients of Business Express, which is contracted to provide delivery services for such major retailers and home shopping specialists as Boots, WH Smith On-Line, M&M Sports, the White Company, Lands End and Thorntons. Third patty contracts are Ofl course to grow rapidly. Mick Janicki, managing director of Business Express, predicts that these are scheduled to reach 40 percent of transactions within three years. Business Express ranks as one of the UK’s ‘big three’ home delivery specialists (alongside Consignia and White Arrow), though .Janicki says, “We do not strive to become the largest. The emphasis is on providing quality innovative services.”
There is full integration from the time an order is placed to its despatch to one of 33 distribution cent res for final delivery. Orders from Littlewoods customers are processed electronically from three call centres within seconds of confirmation and downloaded ((the appropriate warehouses for picking. The warehouse for textiles and clothing is a short distance from the sorting hub and is linked by a conveyor system which feeds directly into the centre. Other products and those from third-party clients of Busines.s Express are delivered by trailer.
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