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David Hole: David Hole, Jim Marsh and Mike Hudson are Senior Consultants based at RM Consulting (the internal consultancy of Royal Mail)
Jim Marsh: Jim Marsh and Mike Hudson are Senior Consultants based at RM Consulting (the internal consultancy of Royal Mail)
Mike Hudson: Mike Hudson are Senior Consultants based at RM Consulting (the internal consultancy of Royal Mail)
In an increasingly competitive world, businesses are beginning to realize that in responding to customer needs, getting closer to the customer is no longer enough. It is merely the price of entry to the marketplace. Today, winning companies need to be proactive in their dealings with customers, anticipating developments and leading the process of change. To that end the process of re-designing a supply chain must focus clearly on the customer. Royal Mail is a case in point, and in examining the approach it has taken to re-design its supply chain, the issues of defining customer requirements, the process of re-design itself and the balance of the hard re-engineering issues with the softer people issues were seen to be of critical importance.
The business environment
Royal Mail has one of the most complex supply chains currently operating within the UK. This complexity is being driven by the differing demands of a multi-customer, multimarket business environment. Royal Mail serves every one of the 49 million posting addresses in the UK. To achieve this task the company employs nearly 170,000 people in over 5,000 offices; it runs some 28,000 vehicles, together with a network of over 60 trains, 31 dedicated and 120 contracted flights per day. In addition, Royal Mail International serves a global network of 300 destinations worldwide, sourced by 1,400 flights per week.
In terms of products and customers, Royal Mail serves almost every business and certainly every home in the country. Business and social markets all use a range of products that vary from stamped first- and second-class letters, and bulk mail products such as Mailsort, to a range of premium, guaranteed and time-critical priority services products.
This infrastructure handles 67 million letters every working day in the UK. Over the last ten years volume has risen by 43 per cent to almost 17 billion items of mail annually (see Figure 1). To that end,...