Then comes the revision, walk sizes are at least as big (despite now being officially designed to push a HCT around the whole duty) if not a fraction bigger in some cases (how does that work if carrying by pouch is far quicker than pushing a HCT?
). But then the "powers that be" have this great plan to condense every frame to 1 base and 2 wings, so that there are 7 columns per frame, at the cost of many walks having some ~1.5cm slots shared between two delivery points (upto ~60% on the larger walks). Why do this? To make every walk appear the same size, regardless of its distance from the depot and its clientelle (after all it is quicker to post mail in a block of flats than in detached houses wityh long drives)?? To carry out World Class Mail directives on floorspace without any sense of logic??? They want savings but have made things inefficient right from the off! Issues include...
The prepper needs to ensure mail for the first house in a shared slot stays to the left side of the slot, while mail for the second on the right, rather than simply placing the letter anywhere in the slot (often roughly sorted small to large size).
When it comes to D2D prep, all mail needs to come out of a shared slot to place the D2D at the back of the first delivery points' mail (somewhere in middle of slot), rather than one lot of D2D being the rightmost item per slot.
When backfacing letters as packet prompts, all mail needs to come out to determine where the first letter is for the second DP in the slot,instead of simply turning over the leftmost piece of mail.
When doing redirections, the prepper needs to check all the mail in each double slot, in case they have accidentally mixed up mail for the two delivery points.
Limited room for thicker mail material like mini-catologues, sometimes there are issues simply fitting all the standard letter items in a shared slot.
No room for small packets in the frame that would go through a letterbox, which will mean extra deliver time opening HCT; locating said item; locking HCT.
Its the little things that make such a big impact on a batch processing task such as prepping... Lets say each "double slot" will take something like an extra ~10 seconds (quite possibly too conservative, might be closer to 15), on a walk with 350 shared slots on a 600 DP frame, that's another 3500 seconds of prep time, or just over 58 minutes. On a walk that is getting out 58 minutes later than the guideline time and the OPG does not want to complete on overtime, that could easily be ~100 delivery point cut-off right there (including attendence calls more in line with 6%+ than the designed walk size of ~3%), before taking any other factors into account.
