Can tech deliver for Postman Pat as GDPR slashes the spam revenue stream?

[TrueBlueTerrier]

https://diginomica.com/2018/05/22/royal ... tion_gdpr/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The Royal Mail has been engaged in a 5 year tech transformation programme with some big learnings on how to introduce new tools to the workforce.

When GDPR kicks in on Friday, there’s one organisation that’s bracing itself to take a significant hit to the bottom line.

That’s Royal Mail, the UK postal service, which warns that 700 million fewer letters will be sent in the coming 12 months as a result of the new regulations.

Now, by letters, let’s be clear, Royal Mail actually means unsolicited junk mail, a perpetual annoyance for customers, but currently a nice little earner for the postal service that the new privacy rules are going to make rather more difficult to cash in on.

Outgoing CEO Moya Greene, who leaves the top job at the end of this month, admits to what she coyly refers to “a little bit of uncertainty” around GDPR, but concedes that there is likely to be knock-on effect if businesses aren’t allowed to spam people using bought-in mailing lists of personal details:

You don’t have the same personal data consideration with what we call door-to-door, which is unaddressed mail. So I can see that people might move some of their volumes in that direction, but you do get a much better return on marketing spend by a precise and properly designed addressed and personalized piece of mail. So I think we have to take a bit of a wait-and-see attitude toward it.

But despite this looming issue, Greene believes that she’s departing the CEO role with Royal Mail a much more technology-enabled organisation for a digital age where e-mail supplants the written letter and e-commerce provides so much of the parcel traffic and business for the postal service:

This was a company that was chronically under-invested. So we had to have a very rigorous detailed approach to regenerating the asset base of the company to get ourselves going, and this was across the board in the operation, equipment, vehicles, but also, very importantly, the technology backbone.

A couple of years ago…that’s where we were at the real peak of dealing with what had been a 10 year chronic under-spend. Correcting the technology backbone of the whole company was a big, arduous five year effort.

And it’s not over yet – the coming year is likely to see a £15 million increase in tech spend on top of the £130 million that was allocated to the five year programme. Greene says:

We have to keep adding now technology so that our services stay current, but that’s at a lower level of spend than what we had to do four or five years ago. But now with a much more stable IT backbone, we can bring service enhancements and new products to market much more quickly, meeting customer needs, now on a monthly basis.

Getting personal
She points to the rollout of PDAs (Postal Digital Assitants) to Royal Mail staff as being a case in point of the benefits of this tech focus. These allow for barcode scanning ‘on the job’, allowing for operational and productivity improvements as part of a Track and Trace initiative.

The barcoding capabilities are also designed to help Royal Mail keep track of how many parcels are passing through the system from very large customers:

We got some pretty big companies that will give us a bag of parcels, and they’re not entirely truthful about actually how many are in them or what they weight. So now we’re able to go back and really starting enforcing the surcharging provisions that have always been in our contract.

But the ‘trace’ part of that has required some delicate negotiations with trades union reps as the PDAs also allows the location of postal staff to be seen at any time the device is activated. That’s seen as a big change in working conditions after delivery staff out on their round have been used to being essentially unsupervised.

From Royal Mail’s point of view, this ability to monitor can be extended to people working in mail sorting offices as well as out on the round, eliminating the need for traditional clocking in and out. It’s pitched as “bringing digital visibility to the operation”. Greene insists:

PDAs, which we rolled out a couple of years ago, now play a critical part in this, and they give much more flexibility to our employees as they are out doing their job.

But she acknowledges that there are cultural and change management issues that need to be addressed when introducing new tech like this: .

I do think at any given point in time when you are working through 140,000 people, there is only so much change in a particular area that human beings can absorb. The tools you give them can help them go faster on an individual basis…the PDAs and the software that is on the PDAs is going to help us accelerate the rate of change in particular areas. But at the end of the day, there’s a human being, that human being used to do the job this way, and now they’re doing the job that way.

It may not be just one change that is going on, it may be three or four at the same time. You always have to gauge it – is this too much, is it too much in a particular area? I have given speeches on this because we can dream of technology advancement and we can explain how the advancement will occur. But one thing that I think managers always overestimate, and maybe this comes from being 64 years old and having seen various technology revolutions in the course of my lifetime, the one thing that managers always overestimate is how fast they can get people to accept it as the way, the only way, that they do their job.

Greene argues that this tech adoption lesson is one that Royal Mail has had to learn the hard way:

We have overestimated just like everybody else, we’re certainly not perfect. We’ve overestimated how long it would take us to get something done. And actually in certain cases, it’s taken us more than twice as long to get that something done. I think that this is a normal managerial frailty. We see a benefit, we see how it could really improve what we’re doing, and then we overestimate our ability to bring it on board or to bring it on board nationally.That is just going to be a forever drag on it as far as I’m concerned.

But from an individual’s point of view, the more tools that you give that individual, the more that individual becomes relaxed with that tool, that individual can see their own ability to absorb change accelerate.

As management, you also need to be aware of your own limitations, she adds:

The other thing we found is that we can resource and monitor and make sure delivery is occurring for only about 100 projects a year. If we try to do more than that, and again this is something that we’ve learned the hard way…we’re in literally 3,000 different places, and I’m only talking the core network. You can envision [change] and speak about it, but, practically speaking, your ability to manage it, in my experience, is generally over-estimated.

My take
I shed no tears for Royal Mail at no longer being to stick spam mail through my letter box I’m afraid. Having had several conversations with postal staff where I’ve asked them face-to-face not to put pizza leaflets etc through the door, only to be told ‘more than my job’s worth, mate’, I say that if GDPR makes it easier to stop this process then so much the better.

There’s a lot wrong with Royal Mail, not least the ‘sorry you weren’t in’ cliche that leaves you having to collect your post from a sorting office when you were quite obviously sitting in waiting for delivery. If Track and Trace makes that easier to counter, then that’s money well-spent.

But fundamentally the organisation is facing enormous digital disruption from the likes of Amazon as it expends its own delivery services. Credit where it’s due to Greene for recognising the need for tech investment and for her well-made comments on the challenge of managing the introduction of new tools into an established workplace process. Her successor needs to follow through on these learnings – and other organisations, hellbent on the pursuit of modernity, would do well to take some notice here as well.

The one consolation I suppose is that at least the UK postal service doesn’t face the additional pressure that its U.S. equivalent faces as a side effect of Trump’s war with the Washington Post!

[hubbahubba]

Although RM will take a hit on this,I would argue that the DSA companies will bear the biggest losses,as their core business is mech letters,of which a large chunk would be affected by this ruling.

[SpacePhoenix]

Although RM will take a hit on this,I would argue that the DSA companies will bear the biggest losses,as their core business is mech letters,of which a large chunk would be affected by this ruling.

The big question is what knock-on affect it'll have on sequencing. If there's too big a drop in letter volumes then RM might think of abandoning sequencing

[A2B]

Although RM will take a hit on this,I would argue that the DSA companies will bear the biggest losses,as their core business is mech letters,of which a large chunk would be affected by this ruling.

The big question is what knock-on affect it'll have on sequencing. If there's too big a drop in letter volumes then RM might think of abandoning sequencing

Abandon sequencing! dream on

[SpacePhoenix]

Although RM will take a hit on this,I would argue that the DSA companies will bear the biggest losses,as their core business is mech letters,of which a large chunk would be affected by this ruling.

The big question is what knock-on affect it'll have on sequencing. If there's too big a drop in letter volumes then RM might think of abandoning sequencing

Abandon sequencing! dream on

Packets is where the money is

[A2B]

Packets is where the money is

Along with reducing the workforce by increasing mechanization

[Celgar]

The GDPR will either be a big scaremongering event like the threat of computers shutting down after the new millennium began or it will really smash RM. So far it has smashed the RM share price by one pound but people seem to be buying in again already. People will want to be in for the final dividend date as well.
I wonder if the GDPR will effect the UK government harvesting UK & EU phone calls and email data to pass on to the US ???