Walk Sequencing back on ???

[24601]

We were a trial office for the Walk Sequencing Machines.A few months back the sequencing programme was put on hold.
We've now been told that the go ahead has been given for us to get a third machine in the spring.
Does anyone know if this means the programme is back on again or is it more of the old same old,same old bulls**t.

[DGP1]

They've got £1.2 billion to spend on new machines so I would assume that the trials are back on. BTW, how is it going, does it work, does it save a lot of time or only 20 minutes per day?

[24601]

They've got £1.2 billion to spend on new machines so I would assume that the trials are back on. BTW, how is it going, does it work, does it save a lot of time or only 20 minutes per day?

I'll repeat from my post of May 2007.

'We are trialing 2 French walk sequencing machines.
The mail arrives from the mail centre in batches containing 12-14 walks and are about 5000-6000 letters in size.It then takes up to 45 minutes to sequence the mail (the mail has to be put through 3 times)
Mail is then in walk order which saves an experienced post person about 10 minutes a day.However it also means that anyone can throw in a walk (even managers)

The machines can also walk sort mail,that takes about 10 minutes to do 12-14 walks.

Before the mail can be sequenced it has to go through a mail centre for franking and coding as the sequencing machines can only read the red bar codes.

They're probably not the all singing all dancing machines that they were made out to be.

Hope this answers some questions

[not me]

ie yet to see this but excuse me if its been posted

how do these machines handle stairs? more specifically tenement stairs eg 1f1,2f1,GFR,2FR or no flat number

[ar26]

So thats what all that red tag bar code stuff was about last year when we delivered the bigest mailsort to all houses from Royal Mail ?

[24601]

ie yet to see this but excuse me if its been posted

how do these machines handle stairs? more specifically tenement stairs eg 1f1,2f1,GFR,2FR or no flat number

The delivery person provides details of the walk which are entered into a programme (A Plus) and the machine puts all letters into the correct sequence for delivery.

[ar26]

Hi sorry been a long day and I'm probably being thick.
I currently start at 6am and box my rather large duty in. I am usually ready to pull out anything from 8:30 - 10am depending on mail traffic. If our office introduce these machines will that basically mean I won't be needed till it's ready to pull out ? Can they do flats and funny size items or are they only for DL & a5 sized envelopes ?
Cheers

[TrueBlueTerrier]

No all walk sequencing does is prepare your coded bundles so they run as per your frame.

ie your Bundle will come :

1 High Street
3 High Street
5 High Street
7 High Street
2 High Street
4 High Street
1 Back High Street
2 Back High Street
........continuing till the end of your walk

You still have to put them in the frame but the theory is you wont be stretching from Top part of frame to bottom and back again, then the middlle part, back to the bottom etc, it should save time.

However, in practice I get 2 - 10% of my coded bundles missorted and I cant see Walk sequencing being any different.

[24601]

They can only handle letters which still have to be thrown into delivery frames,in theory it just doesn't take so long.Saves around 10 minutes a day.

[POSTMAN]

Walk Sequencing


We attended a meeting in October with the managers responsible for Royal Mail’s walk sequencing proposal. They confirmed the rumour that their plans for the main rollout of the compact sequencers has now been put back until January 2010. Could it be that they are waiting to see what comes out of the Hooper Review or have they just run out of money? They also said they were not now in a position to give us a final list of where they want to site the machines as this could still change. Seven machines have now been installed in the Gatwick Mail Centre and these will be used to test the machines in an operational environment and to see what effect they have on deliveries in the surrounding offices. Further machines will also be installed at Brighton and Worthing at some time next year. Four machines have already been put into the old Bristol ECDO. Management say these will only be used for testing but that’s a bit hard to believe. The feeling locally is that they’ll want to use them on live mail as well, but as yet there’s been little or no union involvement in their deployment. Management also told us they intend putting live mail through the machine at Southampton.

http://www.royalmailchat.co.uk/communit ... rt#p127659" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Tman]

They can only handle letters which still have to be thrown into delivery frames,in theory it just doesn't take so long.Saves around 10 minutes a day.

Which taken over the whole country, is a lot of minutes, but the real advantage is the so-called "de-skilling" aspect inherent in using machines to do the work of humans.

RM hopes that eventually the person putting letters through doors will be P/T, or school mums, or other such minimum wage employees, and this was predicted maybe 18-20 years ago.

As is usual with the CWU, rather than working to get the best deal for existing employees, they chose to bury their heads in the sand and hope the whole issue would go away, which is the usual and expected reactive, rather than proactive, approach.
Too late now though, as they'll be fighting from an already weakened position.

Obviously the duty losses from moving from FCTs to CFCs, and code desks + presorters to MTTs and IMPS in the early 1990s, were ignored by the CWU hierarchy...

[ar26]

so if they save each walk 10 mins a day the potential savings for my office are around £30k a year in reduced / redeployed hours, be interesting to know how much they cost to buy and maintain, as it seems a major investment for not a lot of benefit. Interesting that Hooper says we are antiquated in the way we do things but didn't actaully say these machines save our foreign cousins any money.

[Big Daz]

They've got £1.2 billion to spend on new machines so I would assume that the trials are back on. BTW, how is it going, does it work, does it save a lot of time or only 20 minutes per day?

On the delivery frame yes, bit it saves time on IPS as more mail is planned to be going through machines.

[majeed]

No all walk sequencing does is prepare your coded bundles so they run as per your frame.

ie your Bundle will come :

1 High Street
3 High Street
5 High Street
7 High Street
2 High Street
4 High Street
1 Back High Street
2 Back High Street
........continuing till the end of your walk

You still have to put them in the frame but the theory is you wont be stretching from Top part of frame to bottom and back again, then the middlle part, back to the bottom etc, it should save time.

However, in practice I get 2 - 10% of my coded bundles missorted and I cant see Walk sequencing being any different.

If I get asked to help throw-in a frame to help someone else, I tell the person I'm helping to carry on throwing-in, and then I take a few bundles of mail for that frame and sort it into piles for each street. I do the sorting on a separate frame. Then, I put all of the streets back together as bundles (each, like the size of a normal mech bundle) and hand them to the person I am helping. I then repeat the process. It makes the job quicker and it works for people who don't know the frame well.

Why don't we just do that, instead of spending millions on expensive machines that don't really save any time? Keep it simple, stupid?

[majeed]

so if they save each walk 10 mins a day the potential savings for my office are around £30k a year in reduced / redeployed hours, be interesting to know how much they cost to buy and maintain, as it seems a major investment for not a lot of benefit. Interesting that Hooper says we are antiquated in the way we do things but didn't actaully say these machines save our foreign cousins any money.

...but isn't sending physical mail, "antiquated" in this day of the email? Isn't that directly saying that Royal Mail is unnecessary?