We, the undersigned, of Stretford DU (122) would like to bring to your attention some of the issues with mail received from the Warrington depot that we face on a daily basis. The entire business is dependent on us, as delivery operatives, to deliver the mail and we feel the whole process can be made smoother with a little co-operation from further up the chain. As there is a focus on target times to enable fast, efficient delivery of mail within a timeframe that the public can begin to expect from us, these changes will both benefit us on our rounds and the company as a whole.

One advantage to companies using TNT over Royal Mail lies with the delivery operative scanning the item to confirm delivery, it seems particularly counter to the business model when having to use our ID’s barcode as regularly as we do instead of the barcode. The process of attempting the original before using our ID may not be a massively time consuming one but the frequency with which we have to do this soon adds up. Below are some of the daily issues we face with barcodes and some possible corrections:

Issue: Several barcodes are printed so poorly that lines are blotches or not straight rendering it useless.
Suggestion: Regular maintenance of printers and spotchecks to check if correctly printing.

Issue: Many barcodes are printed over graphics or text causing the scanner to be unable to recognise them.
Suggestion: Consider using the QR code over barcode on graphics/text heavy items.

Issue: Many items missing barcodes altogether (mail from “More Than” never has barcodes).
Suggestion: Making sure the items go through the printer.

Issue: “Slipped” barcodes printed on glossy items.
Suggestion: More care when passed through printers or use of QR codes instead.

A few of our rounds still receive incorrectly sequenced mail which requires us to revisit previous loops and block faces which has a much larger effect on target times. We would like to see these errors corrected through checking the system by the sequence numbers in our books to make sure the error is not an inherent one.

Regarding target times, the depot doesn’t receive the item count in time in order to correctly process the information needed to provide us with target times before we begin our rounds. We would like this information to be sent at a time prior to our departure or sent with the mail when it arrives in the morning.