Royal
Mail has announced an investment of around
£130 million over five years in hand-held technology to provide more flexible
delivery for customers and better tracking capability.Through its Field Force Automation services, BT will work with Royal
Mail to decide which hand-held device to deploy. Royal Mail will roll out the
new hand-held scanners to postmen and women in 2015.The contract with BT also covers the day-to-day management of the
current and new devices and operating platform for a five-year period. Royal
Mail’s mobile connectivity is provided by BT under an existing, separate
contract. Within the investment, Royal Mail expects to finalise a contract in
the coming weeks for the supply of software applications for the devices.
The
five-year investment is part of Royal Mail’s IT transformation programme, a key
objective of which is to support the delivery of our parcels strategy. This
includes enabling Royal Mail to be more flexible and customer responsive.
Earlier
this year, Royal Mail launched a new parcels shipping and tracking platform to
enable e-retailers to improve integration between their IT systems and Royal
Mail.
This summer, Royal Mail also made its Local Collect ‘click and
collect’ service with Post Offices available to its 20,000 SME contract
customers. This enables many of the UK’s leading small and medium size online
businesses to offer shoppers the option of collection from any of 10,500 Post
Office branches.
Nick Landon, Managing Director of Royal
Mail Parcels, said: “We are delighted to announce our investment of around £130
million in IT which will better enable us to develop new services for parcels
customers. This is part of our on-going programme to continue to respond to the
needs of our customers and maintain our leading position in the UK parcels
market.”
Luis
Alvarez, Chief Executive Officer of BT Global Services, said: “We’re passionate
about helping leading organisations like Royal Mail blend the latest
technologies with their people’s skills and experience to get the best business
results – something we call the art of connecting. The new hand-held devices,
provided and managed by BT, will transform parcel tracking, helping Royal Mail
create an even better connection with its customers.”
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