Parcelforce doing Royal Mail parcels

[wilkco]

How completely pointless turned up to an address with letters and 3 parcels to the have parcelforce to turn up at the same time to deliver one large Royal Mail parcel. It had a Royal Mail tracked 24 label on it.

Would it not be better to do it the other way and give us their parcels and move a sprinter to each delivery office to cover any over size stuff that can’t fit on the normal post routes ?

[kazardaimenu]

It’s baffling. You could have a postie, parcelforce, DPR and LAT driver all turn up to one house on the same day.

[Smoothbackground]

At neighbouring offices to mine LATs are very often run separately to DPR just to give a bit of easy OT to the old boys. But the DPR and LAT items should be delivered by the one van — the whole point of a DPR is that it starts late enough to be able to incorporate the LAT items.

[Ren Hoëk]

Our managers don't know how to manage the company. They don't know how to manage deliveries thats for sure. Why? Because they are so far removed from it they are making decisions on something they have no experience of. You have planners who have never been on delivery. It's like an electrician trying to tell you how to bake.

[GRS]

Our managers don't know how to manage the company. They don't know how to manage deliveries thats for sure. Why? Because they are so far removed from it they are making decisions on something they have no experience of. You have planners who have never been on delivery. It's like an electrician trying to tell you how to bake.

[ted_e_bear]

Does anybody else wonder why with the obsession of being a parcel company that doesn't really give a flying about mail that they aren't absolutely aggressively concentrating on growing parcelforce to be their main parcels delivery operation ?

Or is that the plan ?

[Smoothbackground]

Parcelforce plays in a crowded and tightly-squeezed marketplace (DX, Yodel, DPD, APC, Arrow, Parcelforce…) with nothing to differentiate itself from the competition. There is no real room for growth. The growth area is smaller parcels delivered through the core RM network of DOs.

Imho the business is just getting PFW into better shape so it can be sold off further down the line.

[Ren Hoëk]

Does anybody else wonder why with the obsession of being a parcel company that doesn't really give a flying about mail that they aren't absolutely aggressively concentrating on growing parcelforce to be their main parcels delivery operation ?

Or is that the plan ?

Royal Mail has far better branding. Mostly thanks to the pr they get from its posties. The very people they are hell bent on pissing off and don’t trust.

[Thommo44]

It’s baffling. You could have a postie, parcelforce, DPR and LAT driver all turn up to one house on the same day.

You could have all 4 at the same time?

[NWpostie]

I think in the future there will be a plan to merge the the two to remove duplication, collecting Parcelforce stuff is the start of it.

[TooManyLoops]

It’s baffling. You could have a postie, parcelforce, DPR and LAT driver all turn up to one house on the same day.

The most stupid part is that we're not allowed to put the packets to the ones if we know the DPR driver has one for the same address

And LATs getting there before the postie is just

[Hyrrokkin]

I think in the future there will be a plan to merge the the two to remove duplication, collecting Parcelforce stuff is the start of it.

Agreed i think that is the medium/long term plan as well

[Beanyjazz]

I'm on collections and we are now collecting every single PF parcel from post offices. From next week they're not even going there to drop parcels off for customers to collect, they now have 3 chances and then it's RTS.

So now (think of the van size difference) we are bringing all PF parcels back to our office, and then a PF driver comes and collects everything oversize. One was waiting outside for over an hour today because he was quiet.

We've not been given 1 trolley for the 20kg+ parcels for 15 collections.

Well played Royal Mail, superb planning!

[Mr Rush]

It’s baffling. You could have a postie, parcelforce, DPR and LAT driver all turn up to one house on the same day.

It's the age old conundrum: multiple frequent shorter deliveries throughout the day or one giant hours long slog covering thousands of DPs. Pick one. You can't carry 9AM specials and LATs on a single van load.

Simon Thomson (RIP) vacillated many a time on Workplace. Sometimes it was a crippling inefficiency to have four people visit the same DP so we needed one person out on an inhumanly long shift doing everything but that meant the vans were sitting idle all morning because it takes all morning to process everything. Then the tea leaves realigned and it was better to have the vans in use across multiple shifts rather than have the network shudder in and out of life.

[Hitcher]

But the DPR and LAT items should be delivered by the one van — the whole point of a DPR is that it starts late enough to be able to incorporate the LAT items.

That was the plan when they stopped using flights a few years ago. DPRs were told to start at 11am because the LATs would arrive about 10:30am and all be sorted ready for us. Of course they didn't arrive and we were sent out with just the morning wave, and eventually we were allowed to start earlier so LATs could be done on overtime. To this day the LATs still turn up after 12.