Everything is Tracked

[SpacePhoenix]

The last 3 days(weds,thurs&sat) have been absolutely ridiculous for tracked on a rural round I’ve been covering with today(Saturday) being like Xmas pressure with a full cage and an extra York full of parcels including several parcel force sized parcels and 5 full mail tray small packets and tracked letters.

Only had time to to packets&parcels and 1st class letters today having done 1 loop of mail on the Wednesday and Thursday with the duty last fully cleared on the Monday.

The poor guy coming back from annual leave on Tuesday will have 5 days of mail including every house for fibrus!!

It's the same on the rural duties in my DO, we're back to peak levels for Tracked and now virtually every thing is Tracked, even Thompson seeds are sending their A4 packets of plants now by Tracked, this time last year it was fairly easy to do the Specials, Tracked and all the collections on two rural duties, now it seems impossible to do them along with the Ic mail.

Yeah, those and the washing up/dishwasher tablets in the brown packet.

I was chatting with a customer yesterday on the village duty I’ve been covering about the amount of packets&parcels I’ve had recently and he told everything he orders is free delivery.

He’s a pensioner in his early 70’s who doesn’t have a car and he literally gets around 4-5 parcels a day of food&drink items as well as cleaning products and toiletries etc.

He's clearly paying for delivery somewhere in the transaction if it's a regular order, rather than just a one off promotion to entice him to reorder.

I said to him is it free delivery when you spend over a certain amount and he said no and that it’s just free whatever he orders.

The point was that he must be paying somewhere, if it not an upfront delivery charge it must be included in whatever he's buying, as no company is just going to take the hit of paying delivery charges. Having said that it seems that most items on Amazon are free delivery if you just direct them to a local collection point or locker.

On Amazon you can get free delivery if you're a member of Prime.

But you have to pay for Prime......no such thing as a free lunch. Somewhere along the line the customer pays for 'Free Delivery'.

At £95 for the year, you don't need to order too much before it pays for itself.

[funkflex55]

I suppose one advantage is you can check that you've scanned them all on delivery when you've finished

And what would be the point of that? Are you going back out & asking to scan them? Go home & switch off Ted, no one's bothered

It acts as a check point at the end of your duty so you know everything has been delivered and something hasn't been left in the back of the van or fallen under the seat etc, hence why I assume why it counts down to zero.

It does but if you're on a van share and your partner delivers an item that's on your PDA it doesn't come off your PDA. You'd have to scan everything just to the loops you do and then not deviate from that to get it working properly.

[TopperGas]

I suppose one advantage is you can check that you've scanned them all on delivery when you've finished

And what would be the point of that? Are you going back out & asking to scan them? Go home & switch off Ted, no one's bothered

It acts as a check point at the end of your duty so you know everything has been delivered and something hasn't been left in the back of the van or fallen under the seat etc, hence why I assume why it counts down to zero.

It does but if you're on a van share and your partner delivers an item that's on your PDA it doesn't come off your PDA. You'd have to scan everything just to the loops you do and then not deviate from that to get it working properly.

Then just check with your van share that they've delivered anything still showing as undelivered, if it's too many to check then just don't bother checking!!

[funkflex55]

I suppose one advantage is you can check that you've scanned them all on delivery when you've finished

And what would be the point of that? Are you going back out & asking to scan them? Go home & switch off Ted, no one's bothered

It acts as a check point at the end of your duty so you know everything has been delivered and something hasn't been left in the back of the van or fallen under the seat etc, hence why I assume why it counts down to zero.

It does but if you're on a van share and your partner delivers an item that's on your PDA it doesn't come off your PDA. You'd have to scan everything just to the loops you do and then not deviate from that to get it working properly.

Then just check with your van share that they've delivered anything still showing as undelivered, if it's too many to check then just don't bother checking!!

110 tracked the other day so my PDA still had 50 odd at the end of the shift. Think it's safe to say that scan to core is dogshit for van shares.

[Mr Rush]

It does but if you're on a van share and your partner delivers an item that's on your PDA it doesn't come off your PDA. You'd have to scan everything just to the loops you do and then not deviate from that to get it working properly.

The DOM we had after P&L came in was under the misapprehension that my frame had all my loops and all my partner's loops were on his own frame. So it would not shock me in the least if the people coming up with this stuff had no idea it doesn't work like that. Throw in phantom duties sharing route headers and it's completely useless.

[funkflex55]

It does but if you're on a van share and your partner delivers an item that's on your PDA it doesn't come off your PDA. You'd have to scan everything just to the loops you do and then not deviate from that to get it working properly.

The DOM we had after P&L came in was under the misapprehension that my frame had all my loops and all my partner's loops were on his own frame. So it would not shock me in the least if the people coming up with this stuff had no idea it doesn't work like that. Throw in phantom duties sharing route headers and it's completely useless.

It's nice to see that the general intelligence levels of COM/DOMs has been below average for such a long time. You can definitely add that to the list of reasons for RMs decline. Along with the consistent lies about office performance.

For anyone that doesn't know scanning the old style barcode when scanning to core makes the process a little bit more sensible as your don't have to continually look at the PDA and then confirm the address. Still crap though.

[SpacePhoenix]

For anyone that doesn't know scanning the old style barcode when scanning to core makes the process a little bit more sensible as your don't have to continually look at the PDA and then confirm the address. Still crap though.

I don't think it'll be that many years until RM phase out the 1D barcodes for any items posted in the UK going to an address in the UK.

[ted_e_bear]

For anyone that doesn't know scanning the old style barcode when scanning to core makes the process a little bit more sensible as your don't have to continually look at the PDA and then confirm the address. Still crap though.

I don't think it'll be that many years until RM phase out the 1D barcodes for any items posted in the UK going to an address in the UK.

Yeah that'd add an extra difficulty to fill out a P739 with the item number so you're probably correct

[ted_e_bear]

I suppose one advantage is you can check that you've scanned them all on delivery when you've finished

And what would be the point of that? Are you going back out & asking to scan them? Go home & switch off Ted, no one's bothered

It acts as a check point at the end of your duty so you know everything has been delivered and something hasn't been left in the back of the van or fallen under the seat etc, hence why I assume why it counts down to zero.

It does but if you're on a van share and your partner delivers an item that's on your PDA it doesn't come off your PDA. You'd have to scan everything just to the loops you do and then not deviate from that to get it working properly.

Maybe they need to change the system perhaps instead of treating it as two duties on a van share it's actually one that's delivered by two people so why not have only one route that two people can scan onto and the info is shared.

[SpacePhoenix]

For anyone that doesn't know scanning the old style barcode when scanning to core makes the process a little bit more sensible as your don't have to continually look at the PDA and then confirm the address. Still crap though.

I don't think it'll be that many years until RM phase out the 1D barcodes for any items posted in the UK going to an address in the UK.

Yeah that'd add an extra difficulty to fill out a P739 with the item number so you're probably correct

At some point in the future RM will brig in a small portable printer that can be paired up with the PDA to print off P739s. There's bound to be a rival firm here in the UK or an equivalent to RM abroad already using such tech

[DGH]

Maybe they need to change the system perhaps instead of treating it as two duties on a van share it's actually one that's delivered by two people so why not have only one route that two people can scan onto and the info is shared.

I can't understand why they don't do that. It'd be much more sensible.

Maybe they don't do it because it'd be much more sensible.

[twoloops]

Yeah that'd add an extra difficulty to fill out a P739 with the item number so you're probably correct

We no longer write 739s out for the 1st attempt, we 739 the 2nd attempt, but make it hard to read or miss a number off the reference as punishment for not being in ……. Twice

[Mr Rush]

I don't think it'll be that many years until RM phase out the 1D barcodes for any items posted in the UK going to an address in the UK.

Yeah that'd add an extra difficulty to fill out a P739 with the item number so you're probably correct

We're already there. Plenty come in without a 1D on them (usually the same that don't even have a human-readable address on them). While I'm aware the 2Ds are human-readable, my experience of punching those into the PDA is that it almost always gets rejected. For those I put 'not supplied' as the tracking number on the P739.

At some point in the future RM will brig in a small portable printer that can be paired up with the PDA to print off P739s. There's bound to be a rival firm here in the UK or an equivalent to RM abroad already using such tech

The GameBoy had a thermal printer almost thirty bloody years ago. I thought we'd have such Area 51 style technology when the PDAs became standard equipment, yet here we are so many years later speculating.

[TopperGas]

For anyone that doesn't know scanning the old style barcode when scanning to core makes the process a little bit more sensible as your don't have to continually look at the PDA and then confirm the address. Still crap though.

I don't think it'll be that many years until RM phase out the 1D barcodes for any items posted in the UK going to an address in the UK.

Yeah that'd add an extra difficulty to fill out a P739 with the item number so you're probably correct

At some point in the future RM will brig in a small portable printer that can be paired up with the PDA to print off P739s. There's bound to be a rival firm here in the UK or an equivalent to RM abroad already using such tech

I thought DPD used them at one point, although can you honestly see printers working with our flaky PDA's, they'll probably take longer to print a 739 than it takes to write one out.

[Hitcher]

We no longer write 739s out for the 1st attempt, we 739 the 2nd attempt, but make it hard to read or miss a number off the reference as punishment for not being in ……. Twice

Firstly, why aren't you doing the job properly?
Secondly, this will lead to customers complaining that no-one attempted delivery.
Thirdly, leaving a card sometimes results in the customer adding a 'safe place' option the next day.