Royal Mail has announced it is installing ten new large parcel conveyors at its mail centres in the coming months, as part of its continued drive to improve efficiency and meet growing demand for parcel deliveries ahead of the peak Christmas period.
The large parcel conveyors, which will speed up parcel sorting and improve their tracking, will be deployed at mail centres where large parcels are currently mostly sorted by hand. The new technology will help Royal Mail to meet increasing demand for parcels, especially of a larger size.
Christmas is Royal Mail’s busiest period, with around double the normal volume of parcels processed.
Since 2017, the average size of a parcel handled by Royal Mail has increased by more than 25%, and the number of large parcels (bigger than a shoebox) handled has more than doubled.
Royal Mail’s in-house engineering team initially designed and built a new large parcel conveyor for the Midlands Parcel Hub, using belts instead of the typical rollers. The same design is now being rolled out across its mail centres.
The original large parcel conveyors are live at Royal Mail’s Gatwick and South Midlands Mail Centres, and installations are now taking place at Jubilee and Tyneside. Ahead of Christmas, conveyors will be deployed at Medway, Birmingham, Leeds, Home Counties North and Belfast. Chelmsford, Greenford and Bristol will have theirs installed by February next year.
We are seeing an increasing number of larger sized parcels being sent through our network as online shopping habits continue to evolve. The addition of our in-house designed large parcel conveyers to some of our busiest mail centres will help us automate the handling of them as much as possible and increase efficiency, especially as we head into the peak Christmas shopping period.
– Neil Chaplain, Engineering and Process Design Director, Royal Mail
Royal Mail is also installing an additional three Parcel Sortation Machines at its mail centres, adding to the 36 currently in operation.
2 Responses
Hard to understand what this means since Royal Mail don’t handle “Large” parcels – in fact they are a frustrating waste of space. We often send “Tubed” items that really are small parcels. Yet Royal Mail were surcharging them for being “Too Big” – We’ve moved all our business away from them now becuase they were adding £10 surcharges every time.
Royal Mail aren’t fit for purpose as a parcel operator – theres not many businesses that only send small square shoeboxes that seems to be what they want – so most businesses are better suited with carriers with a bit more flexibility – I guess its why Evri are surging since they have similar volume limits as RM, but will ultimately take somthing twice the length, as long as the volume isn’t massive.
What kind of packaging and shape were your “tubed” items? Did you manage to get credits for the surcharges?