Why does it seem to go wrong every Xmas!

[2791dean]

Been with Royal Mail for 13 years and every Xmas they seem to get stuff wrong, for instance red dot collection! I have had 1 red dot driver collecting on my run and he started yesterday!! we have been mad busy for the last 2 weeks or more and they put red dot on the day we go quiet! (not the 1st year this has happened) Mail cemtres! not enough yorks available when turning up to empty your vehicle and get rid of your specials! (apparently lots of yorks given to the competetion to help them out!) Not enough staff to assist in unloading your van so you can get away and get back to your collection ON TIME! shortages of bags to give to customers and post offices alike! I mean! Xmas happens every year so why do we get caught out when we know it's coming!!!


I have another gripe ABC barcode scanners, when these were introduced I asked the question will these be used for/as a disciplinary tool the answer was "NO they are purely a monitoring tool" strange how some months past and then all of a sudden you are being faced with disciplinary action if you fail to scan barcodes OR if you scan early!(and were not talking a lot here!) part of the problem is that if you miss or fail to scan the barcode by accident the scanner doesn't give you that information, it doesn't tell you what you have missed/failed to scan so you can go back and re-scan it just gives you the bare information (how many points you've scanned etc) with so may things to have in your hands it's easy to forget to scan carrying a bag for mail, van keys, large bunch of box keys scanner (you may need to be an octopus to work for royal mail soon!), as for scanning I can't see what harm this does?? if the customer is ready when you arrive surely it is better to collect and get on your way as you don't know what delays you may have around the next corner! I know about post comm enforcing the rules and fines etc but surely an agreement could be reached where the scanner just held the amount of collection points that needed to be scanned with a start time at the begining and a finish time and as long as the amount of collections matched between those times the that would suffice??


Steve

[TeeferTiger]

They were meant to be starting trialling the PDAs with the collections. That wouldn't need downloading and would scan in real time. I think you could rescan again if you scanned earlier because there was no data stored on the PDA saying you'd already scanned it etc.

We asked our collections manager a while back if we could have a "dummy" barcode on our collection sheets so that if we do accidentally scan something early, we can scan the dummy barcode, and then scan the real barcode again, without having to go to a different box.

[krussel]

They have been using delivery PDA's for afternoon collections for a few weeks now. What goes wrong is the battery as when its been out on delivery for 4 hrs + in freezing temps mine was down to 13% and not playing ball. In fact its completly died now. They need a second spare battery on charge in the office to swap them over.

[Pat Ostman]

They have been using delivery PDA's for afternoon collections for a few weeks now. What goes wrong is the battery as when its been out on delivery for 4 hrs + in freezing temps mine was down to 13% and not playing ball. In fact its completly died now. They need a second spare battery on charge in the office to swap them over.

agreed, battery is s**t and unit s**t in -temps