Post Office Limited:PEC Update

[POSTMAN]

Post Office Limited

The Postal Executive agreed three documents concerning POL in December. The first concerned the agreed Terms of Reference for the Best Way, Lean Project. This is a project in Crown Offices to identify ways of improving revenue through sales growth by enhanced efficiency. A pilot had already taken place earlier in the year at two offices in the Midlands and the plan was to extend this to 18 offices in the Manchester area. Some concern was expressed at the PE about certain aspects of the project that smacked of TQM, such as “continuous improvement processes”. National Officer Andy Fury assured the meeting that no loss of hours or jobs would be involved and that the Union would be fully involved in all activity and on that basis the document was agreed.

A further document was agreed concerning the reduction in management posts in Crown Offices. This will lead to a reduction of 167 Assistant Branch Managers and a new allowance of £1.20 per hour for CWU grades covering for managers’ absence. This is due to start from the beginning of January this year. The final document concerned the integration of the Retail Sales Consultant grade into the Customer Service Consultant grade, which will result in a pay increase for all those moving from the lower paid RSC grade.


Pete Keenlyside
Postal Executive
15 January 2010

Full update in the news forum here...

http://www.royalmailchat.co.uk/communit ... 6&p=231029" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Running Man]

The Lean project is arguably the most ridiculous project ever undertaken anywhere in Royal Mail Group.
Talk about taking a sledgehammer to crack a walnut.
It is blatantly obvious to anybody with a grain of common sense that this project is going to cost tens of thousands of pounds across the business to save a few quid here and there.
Some of the outputs of this project so far are beyond surreal.
From what I understand about some of the findings, a blind man on a galloping horse could spot a better way of doing things within Crown Offices and the real inefficiencies tend to be those tasks that are outwith our control in the office; will anybody ever sort out our cash, stock and stores management?
Personally I cannot wait for a team of people to spend time in my office to conclude that we need to keep the more requested items closer to the counter thereby saving a five second walk every two hours!
UNBELIEVABLE!!! Ditch this project now and retain at least a little bit of dignity.

[billyhayes]

Some of the outputs of this project so far are beyond surreal.

Share them with us my good man! I have been digging for details on this for months and getting nowhere!

[bigjames]

Some of the outputs of this project so far are beyond surreal.

Share them with us my good man! I have been digging for details on this for months and getting nowhere!

Billy,

Add these to the list - "Man the head of the queue (if you have one of course) all the time"
and "Have all of your staff in when you have the most customers, apparently called 'Hotspots'"

Genius!

[Running Man]

The best output that a BM could come up with when asked "tell us what difference it's made to your office" was this.
When any of the team secured a referral to the FSS they would walk to the end of the counter and mark it on a whiteboard, thereby 'wasting' a few valuable seconds of serving time every time a referral was secured. To cure this, having taken advice from the Lean 'manager',the team were each given their own ticklist to keep at their position, that the BM could examine throughout the day and transfer the totals to the aforementioned whiteboard. Does that qualify for surreal?
Another great discovery of the Lean project I have heard of, as I alluded to in my initial post, is the extremely radical move to keep the more popular forms, such as passports and EHICs, close to hand, once again saving countless seconds in the course of a day?
Quite simply, it's 'Time and Motion' dressed up as a 21st century initiative.
I can't help but think of 'The Emporer's New Clothes' when I think of Lean; all the heirarchy are raving about it and I'm the little boy at the back stating the bleedin' obvious.
I just wonder how much money (that we clearly haven't got) we will throw at this before somebody hears that little boy shouting!
I really do despair!!!

[PostalOfficer]

I shouldn't be cynical, as I haven't seen any details of this work lean or whatever it's called, BUT...

Does anyone remember Reduction In Paperwork? Less paperwork, sure, so they got rid of the Canadian Money Order summary form and a couple of other inconsequential bits of paper. Just look how that has been replaced by the blizzard of emails/spreadsheets/conference calls monitoring sales hour-by-hour.

My BM must spend virtually the whole day mucking about with this sort of rubbish.

I would think that everything in our power to save time has been done already, with the latest duty cuts we're running flat out and are pretty adept at thinking up shortcuts.

Suggestions to improve things outside our control:
Drag photo booth to nearest waste site.
Cut out sales monitoring, all the info. comes out of Horizon anyway, no need for it to be reported every few minutes.
Let us go back to ordering stock and stores by email like we did till 2 years ago before they put it on Horizon. How to make a 10 minute job (always the last thing before I went home on Saturday!) drag on for 30 minutes.
Cut out sales meetings/training and use the man hours on the counter serving/selling rather than trying to stay awake listening to manager recite figures.
Close at 13:00 on Saturday like we always used to. We're only catering for the folks who want a lie in on Saturday. Put the hours to better use.
Close at 17:00 on weekdays. Lots of other banks and shops here do so. Is it really worth deploying man hours for the few tail enders who can't pull thenselves together? Once more, use the hours on a Monday morning.
Take the auto. cash ordering system offline and let us ring up if we want something. If you deal with it, you know what I mean.
BoI ATM? Now there's a topic in itself It takes soo much more work than the old one! Save a bit more cash by shooting the bloke who signed up to pay 6% on what's in the machine. We must have MUG written above us.
While you're at it, same fate for the person who promised we would pay a £7m fine for not getting enough insurance quotes.
And don't even get me going about the time we spend feeding the 3 letter acronyms with data/phone calls etc.
And from reading the last post, get rid of anyone connected with project lean!

There you are, counters in profit with happy staff with my simple 1 year plan. Vote for me for Alan Cook's job

[PostalOfficer]

To cure this, having taken advice from the Lean 'manager',the team were each given their own ticklist to keep at their position, that the BM could examine throughout the day and transfer the totals to the aforementioned whiteboard.

As I said, dump the whiteboard. You've still done a referal! Then your BM could get on with some proper work.
Also, dump the lean manager and save even more money. Or even better, get me one of these jobs

... is the extremely radical move to keep the more popular forms, such as passports and EHICs, close to hand, once again saving countless seconds in the course of a day?

Being basically idle, I thought of this ages ago.

[Running Man]

Excellent post from Postal Officer and I agree 100% with absolutely every detail contained within it.
Unfortunately it's now 2355 and I'm scared that if I start adding my opinions to any of it then I might not stop!
So I'll live to fight another day and refer you to my favourite line detailed below:
"they couldn't see what should have been so obvious."
If the little people like us can see what's going wrong then why can't our alleged senior managers?
Never mind; we can all spend the next three months chasing car quotes in the hope that 1 in 10 might turn into a sale. Madness even by POL standards.
Say goodnight to the troops.

[saunders265]

After 29 years in 15 different Crown Offices, 22 years of these as a Branch Manager in 7 different offices, nothing surprises me anymore. It is deeply saddening to me that we continually lurch from one strategy to another: Waiting Times – Efficiency – Sales. I have never worked in another industry, so perhaps it’s just life, but it seems such a great shame that we spend so much time, effort, and money re-inventing what we have done before. The Sales agenda is inherently highly wasteful, with so much time spent just talking about it when the obvious is before our eyes – it just is not working.

Is Mr Cook’s departure a signal of a forthcoming major change connected with reductions in public spending?

[PostalOfficer]

If the little people like us can see what's going wrong then why can't our alleged senior managers?

Because we actually do the job; more and more senior managers in all walks of life are direct entrants from university or other industries; they would have no idea what most of our job really entails. I bet underlings tell the senior management that they have put computerised cost-saving systems in place, but nobody bothers to find if they really work for us.

I remember a TV programme called "Back to the Floor". A water board chairman was sent to a depot to work on the front line. He arrived on Monday a.m. and found everyone reading the paper. Why? Computer system didn't start working for another hour. Back in the boardroom the IT driector assured him the problem had been fixed weeks ago. Because he had actually seen it for himself, he was then able to assure the IT director that it wasn't fixed and to go and sort it. If he had relied on the IT directors assurances he would not have known that thousands of man hours were being spent drinking tea!

I'll bet this happens a lot above us. Substitue Cash ordering system in the above and you get the idea

[PostalOfficer]

Re BillyHayes enquiry above.

In addition to yesterdays post I would add:

Get some staff on the HomePhone sales line, so that when a customer wants to sign up I don't sit like an idiot for 20 mins. trying to put them through.
Dump the SVM in the same skip as the photo booth.
Did I mention sorting out the planned order every day??
Why do we have to go through endless recorded messages to talk to somebody at "head office"? e.g. a clerk impounds a forged £20. I need a number. I ring the "help"line. I sit thru' countless menus and messages because I know I want the very last option. I recite my name, office, FAD, eye colour etc. and ask for somebody to ring back. Ten hours later when somebody else is on the admin. duty a call come for me. Paul runs down the counter and interputs what I'm doing only to find it's the number for the note that's lying on the desk in the back Don't tell me about saving time...
Why does everybody who rings up ask for the Branch Manager? We run round to find him only to find him hand the phone back to me as its something I deal with.
Oh yes, I've put it on another thread, but get rid of the Pricing in Proportion system.
And could we please have a set of scales EACH, so I don't have to wait for Claire to finish weighing a packet before I start mine? When we had the refurb., they blanked off 2 positions. ABM, said can we keep the scales for the other positions. "No".

[Running Man]

Great post from saunders265.
I still refuse to believe that our alleged senior managers do not know how much money is being wasted on sales.
(Can anybody tell me what a SEM actually does?)
I can only conclude that they are all so pig-headed that they are unwilling to admit that our wonderful five year plan is seriously flawed and will only lead to more office closures in (or before) 2011.
I would love to know just how much money is being thrown away on conference calls every day by POL. Further to this and almost as importantly, how much of a negative influence are these diabolical verbal exchanges having on the people that have to attend them. Failing to dial in can often result in a 121 bollocking from the workhorse known as a CAM, because no excuse seems to be good enough for not attending the daily, twice daily, hourly calls.
What on earth did we do with our time before conference calls???

[counter man]

I recently spent a few days in an office with the QMS system....the one where the customer takes a ticket and waits....and waits....and waits....

What would the lean team make of the scenario where we sit calling for customers who have left the office.....calling 3 times....and still no one...this can happen over and over again....and all you do is sit there doing nothing while customers glare at you!!