The Last Post for Royal Mail?

[bristolchris]

The Last Post for Royal Mail?
Our postal service is at a tipping point and, as competition increases, the strike has done it great commercial damage
Grant Ringshaw

FOUR days ago, an e-mail flashed up on Lancashire small businessman Paul Farquhar’s computer screen. It was the news he had been dreading. Vital blood tests sent to a laboratory in Glasgow had been ruined because of delays in the post.

Like tens of thousands of enterprises across Britain, Farquhar’s company, Healthy and Essential, a supplier of food supplements and other medical services, has been plunged into crisis by the worst postal strike in 20 years.

Farquhar believes he can ride out the storm, but others may be less fortunate. A series of strikes by the Communication Workers Union (CWU) has crippled the postal system, leaving a backlog of about 100m letters and parcels.

At stake is the future of Royal Mail as it struggles to transform itself from a Victorian relic – and its long-held role as an arm of the nanny state – into a modern delivery company.

Royal Mail has seen commercial rivals eat into its market since it lost its monopoly over postal services at the start of 2006. Courier firms gained a licence to collect and distribute letters, handing them over to Royal Mail for delivery on the last – and most costly – leg of the journey to the letterbox.

Some rivals such as UK Mail, owned by Business Post, which collect mail but use the Royal Mail’s postmen and postwomen to deliver letters and packages the “final mileâ€

[Edward Hunter]

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/b ... 651549.ece

Plenty of ill informed comments as usual. "I understand they are fighting for their terms and conditions but that is no concern of mine" well my reply to that is "I understand you are trying to run your business but i am fighting for my terms and conditions AND your cheap postal service! Try our competitors and see how much they charge.

[johno47]

Correct E H, they made all that fuss about the Amazon contract, i have had quite a few Amazon packets over the last few weeks with TNT stickers on...UNITY IS STRENGTH.

[fishtank]

he and Leighton have managed to pull the business out of a £938m crippling loss in 2002 to an operating profit of about £100m,
no they f**king didnt WE DID!!
:cfo :lfo

[F0zziebear]

How did YOU turn the business around?

Did you design the Single Daily Delivery, Mail Centre Review, Transport Review, Managerial Headcount Reduction, Head Office Review, Sales restructuring, Towards Effective & Efficient Support Services, NO!

It's about time some of you realised that you are v.important and deliver a service.

Marketing the guardians of profit, by coming up with products and services which you contribute to delivering.

Senior Mgmt come up with a strategy, and other associated programmes to deliver that.

It's about time the tail stopped wagging the dog. Commerical companies are driven by Marketing and what customers want, not by what operations are prepared to do. This comment applies to both management within operations and the operators themselves.

You will understand what I mean once the competition come to the makret place with their own products and services. You only have to look at other countries to see what other products are out there.

F0zz

Please someone come on here with some rational comments rather than childish school playground nonsense, maybe a separate board is required to let off steam and draw little pictures

[fishtank]

The tail does not wag the dog in this company because we are not the tail we are the whole dog this company's only major asset is it's workforce These were Alan leighton's words not mine
save your blue sky thinking for someone more easily impressed.

[johno47]

Fozzie what an absolute load of bullshit, management didnt turn this company round, management put this company in that position in the first place, by making some of the worst business decisions ever made, you talk about how we turned this company around how about 50,000 jobs going, how about changing to a single delivery, how about increasing the percentage of first and second class mail delivered, how about having paltry bonuses while management walked away with thousands of pounds in bonuses, we make this company tick, if management had bothered to ask us how this company could have been improved they would have got good sensible productive answers, instead we have had to put up with incompetant managers who know nothing about the job and even less about the true worth of its staff, if you want to draw pictures and play with crayons perhaps you should join Crozier, who has stamped his feet and thrown his dummy out of the pram and refused to talk to anybody because he wanted his own way,
if you want an arguement about this business then bring it on...UNITY IS STRENGTH.

[Jimi]

[ROCKY]

fozz
what strategy are we talking about,all i see is flailing around in the dark borrowing any old idea and hoping it works,these two have done nothing that a half decent time and motion man coud not have done at a much lower cost we should be the inovaters not the sheep following everyone else

[wont cross the line]

all they did was turn things back the way they were before they decided to bye all the other crap like dutch post waste money on consignia and all are hard work which goes without as much as a thank you lets shove it up em big time :cfo :lfo

[norbet colon]

fozz
what strategy are we talking about,all i see is flailing around in the dark borrowing any old idea and hoping it works,these two have done nothing that a half decent time and motion man coud not have done at a much lower cost we should be the innovators not the sheep following everyone else

Fozzie I'll deal with your points
1 I can't see any childish cat calling on this thread , sorry;
that's insulting to the regular union guys and mods
2 The Transport Review , i} The RMT union , English Welsh & Scottish Railways staff certainly have some views on that ii ] quote the CWU " the brains trust that thought of the transport review iii) A lot of ex railway stuff that got put on the wagons had to be then put on the planes iv) "teething problems " with Daventry NDC v) failure after failure, 11 hours for a bag to go from London to Preston, mail must have gone faster in the 1800's & antiquated , steam trains .
3 Post Office Marketing etc -- try reading comments on the admittedly very right wing BBC comment on this sections -issues with using outdated software , reliance on MS Office . If RM was supposedly that good , why weren't managers only too keen to jump ship ? The Parliamentary Select Committee verdict -no imagination , no vision
4 SDD - the teething problems bedding in , RM playing fast & loose as per usual, that went down well at the legendary Kirkby DO on dispatches eh ? , RM's legendary implementation , some staff at PDO South on 5 days , some on six , Unofficial IA's , then RM's supposedly firm but fair managers to discourage Unofficial IA causing even more trouble but it'd be naive to expect common sense , logic etc on Planet Royal Fail ???
Lurid newspaper headlines , mail on your doorstep during Corrie , armies of casuals . The North Lancs & Cumbria BS had to write to the Evening Post about Postman Prats headlines stating blame should be apportioned to the idiots in charge . However this is what you get when these commercial people who run something that is neither one thing or the other borrow "best practice " from elsewhere with little practical thought as to how to . Also there are far too many people in sales/ non -ops that take all this sloganeering as fact /gospel from the FA failure and the mars bar salesman.
5 Managerial Headcount Reduction -15 layers of management , more top heavy than Jordan , a culture that exists for the benefit of it's managers AND still does !. The so called losses came from paying all these people off, the CMA threatening ballots when only 1500 volunteered for Allan's axe. The idiots at area level with morals of a alleycat stopping at nothing to avoid the axe .
All the mediocre people that stayed and the better ones joining the private operators .
6 Mail Centre Reviews - Yes many are badly run places . Central Lancs Zoo- MCM has 4 1-2 years to sort a place out , fails; his reward is promotion to Area Manager . Leighton's love Child comes in , his cunning plans - get rid of a SM due to "apparently" his "refuelling issues" , can't have people thinking RM is run by idiots now can we ? , get rid of the manual SM who incidentally is the useless CMA rep . Apparent inside job on the locker , SM chasing after armed robbers to "save RM" & his own skin . NSM suddenly promoted after Police were very interested in his "interesting" lifestyle & circumstances investigating the ram raid . The Replacements weren't much better either .
Our New Way of Working has been a absolute disaster , nothing set up , a total farce.
Sorry Fozzie but you disappoint me as you've contradicted yourself so often from your previous posts .

[Wild Cat]

We can expect this usual round of propaganda saying we are losing business here and there and this is the end of RM.

They always come back as their only motivation is money and RM are always the cheaper option so we win every time.

As for the bleeding heart story about the blood tests what about all the postmen and women who's health is being ruined by :cfo and :lfo?