Postal Hub podcast

Kit Ahweyevu, founder and CEO of Mindweaver, on building diverse teams and how diversity fuels innovation:

• The hallmarks of true innovation
• Creating space for ideas
• Testing and exploring new ideas
• Formulating and implementing diversity policies
• Moving away from box-ticking
• Diversity as part of strategy, innovation, productivity and profitability
• Understanding the customer base to build mass market products and services
• Why diversity and inclusion are two different things
• Neurodiversity
• Delivery companies gaining an advantage in technology

Visit Mindweaver's website or LinkedIn page for more.

Bertrand Späth, co-founder of active tracking provider Kizy Tracking, discusses creating a modern tracking solution and enhancing the customer experience:

• Creating best-in-class customer tracking
• Transparency in cross-border shipping
• Customer expectations - especially younger digital natives' expectations
• Current problems with parcel tracking, including:
  • Visibility
  • Quality of data
  • Passive barcode scanning systems
  • Missing scans
• Creating a great customer experience with parcel tracking
• Active tracking
  • Kizy's active tracking solution for letters and parcels
  • Affordable active tracking
  • Weight and quality of service
  • Cross-border shipments
• Security of parcels - even when being handled by partner networks
• Reusable technology
• Case study on how active tracking helped clear international bottlenecks
• Theft detection
• Measuring delivery network performance
• The future of tracking
  • Need for transparency
  • Global services
  • 5G and other tech advances
• Managing tracking data
• Active tracking enhancing delivery services

Visit kizytracking.com for more information.

Marek Ròżycki, managing partner at Last Mile Experts - and one half of the Last Mile Prophets - joins me to talk about how city centres are changing during the pandemic:

• Cities closing off lanes and parking zones
• Creation of bicycle lanes and pedestrian zones
• Role of electric vehicles in city centre delivery
• Out-of-home delivery, including parcel lockers
• Local authorities' role in creating carrier-agnostic delivery infrastructure
• Maintaining capacity for growing e-commerce parcel volumes
• The war on white vans

Then James Hale, manager of the postal social services project at the UPU, talks about how postal operators have been helping local communities around the world:

• Background to the project
• Researching social services offered by various postal operators - in addition to their core services
• Separating additional social services from existing universal (or community) service obligations
• What posts have done to help governments and populations to help respond to the pandemic
• Benchmarking to help posts offer social services
• Three case studies:
  • An Post - new home-checking service
  • La Poste - helping delivery and collect educational materials
  • Australia Post - home delivery of medicines

Click here for more information about these three case studies on the UPU website.

Visit the project's page on the UPU website.

John Acton, managing partner at DPI Europe, discusses overcoming the seven deadly corporate mindsets to stimulate innovation in corporations. We cover:

• Content vs critical thinking consultancy
• Bureaucracies smothering creative thinking in a big organisation
• What is a deadly mindset? And how does it relate to innovation?
• Stripping away barriers to innovation
• Breaking out of cycles
• The problems of "processes"
• Power struggles and internal politics
• How companies can disrupt themselves
• Priorities and knee-jerk responses
• Table-thumping!
• The budget battlefield
• How start-ups can punish big corporates (like postal operators) for failure to innovate
• The bonus system and linking reward to innovation
• Generating ideas
• Growth is underpinned by innovation, which is underpinned by creative thinking

Author, podcast host, and host of the eCommerce MasterPlan podcast Chloë Thomas returns to talk about e-commerce delivery from a retailer and customer perspective. We cover:

• Speed vs cost vs green
• Giving customers what they want… and paying for it!
• Changing consumer expectations thanks to That Virus
• Will customers still want fast delivery? Or will it depend on the product category?
• Customers switching to online purchasing - and post-pandemic buying habits
• Consumer backlash - customer service at e-commerce retailers being overwhelmed by complaints (which are often delivery-related)
• Communicating with customers and using interactive delivery management (IDM) to allow customers to manage their deliveries
• Best practice in in-flight communications
• Pro-active post-purchase communications with customers
• Reducing customer complaints
• Reducing returns
• Do retailers think they have to compete with Amazon?
• Retailers' awareness of the environmental impact of e-commerce delivery - including packaging and returns
• Consolidating e-commerce deliveries (e.g. Amazon Day)
• Green delivery slots - and nudge behaviour
• Alternative delivery modes (e.g. parcel lockers, deliver to neighbour, safe place)
• Dealing with returns
• How the pandemic is changing e-commerce returns
• Chlöe's bold predictions for the future of e-commerce!

Amazon is using its B2C infrastructure to quietly dominate in B2B. Joining me to discuss this is Dean Maciuba, Director Consulting Services at Logistics Trends & Insights. We cover:

• Amazon Business - the dominant marketplace in the USA?
• How Amazon leverages its existing network of fulfilment centres
• Fulfilment costs
• SKU range
• Amazon's Delivery Service Partners - and shipping costs
• Multi-piece deliveries
• How much of Amazon DSPs' volumes consists of B2B shipments
• Amazon parcel volumes directed to DSPs - and which carriers are missing out
• Impact of Amazon's presence in B2B on FedEx and UPS
• Can anyone compete with Amazon in B2B?
• Importance of the sales force
• Amazon's analytical prowess
• Could Amazon Business expand into other markets?

Rebecca Hall, founder and director of fleet management, compliance and driver safety tool HH Driveright and courier firm JMHC, joins me to discuss modern fleet management - especially in the age of COVID-19:

• How JMHC started out as a single van and grew to a national fleet of 500 vehicles
• The importance of fleet management, including safety
• The fleet management response to COVID-19, including:
  • Vehicle servicing and repairs
  • Sourcing backup vehicles
  • In-house vehicle maintenance
  • Causes of road accidents during the pandemic
  • Road congestion and vehicle speed
  • Coaching good driving behaviour
• Using HH Driveright to check drivers are right to work
• Monitoring vehicle defects
• Managing fleet accidents remotely - and quickly
• Employee drivers and owner/drivers in the same fleet
• Vehicle theft - causes and prevention
• Regulation of the light vehicle fleet
• Standard of vehicle - driven by the customer
• Being a professional driver… not just someone who drives a van
• Driver response to this style of fleet management
• Retaining drivers
• Owner/drivers and the grey fleet

Click here to visit the HH Driveright website for more information about modern fleet management.

Sandra Bonfigli, from the Procurement Unit of the UPU Development Cooperation Directorate, outlines how the UPU is distributing key safety equipment for postal workers in least development countries:

• The role of the UPU in responding to natural disasters
• Distributing personal protection kits to various countries
• How the UPU partnered with another UN agency to overcome difficulties such as airport closures and air cargo shortages

Then Paul Steidler from the Lexington Institute joins me to discuss the Universal Service Obligation (USO) in the USA:

• Current obligations on the US Postal Service
• How USOs are defined (or not defined!) in the USA
• Defining a letter
• Frequency of delivery
• Could parcels become part of the USO?
• Pharmaceutical deliveries
• Is there political will to reach a compromise?
• Postal reform and losses in the letters service
• Regulatory relief in other countries
• Political barriers to reform or regulatory relief
• Viability of the letters service
• The possibility of reducing the number of delivery days per week
• Pricing
• The post office network

Cathy Morrow Roberson, founder and lead analyst at Logistics Trends & Insights, joins me to discuss the air cargo capacity crunch and modal shift:

• Reduced numbers of flights
• Essential vs non-essential cargo during the COVID-19 pandemic
• Repurposed passenger aircraft carrying cargo
• Moving air cargo to rail
• Rail's advantages over air and sea (ocean) cargo
• Mail trains running from China to Europe
• Direct-to-consumer shipping from China
• Speed of long-distance shipping
• Will air cargo volumes recover post-coronavirus?
• A recession and the impact on air capacity
• Creative solutions - including Ukrposhta's charter flight
• Multi-modal transport
• Domestic air cargo alternatives
• Impact on Amazon Prime's delivery promise
• Meeting fast delivery demands without using aircraft
• Inland ports / hubs
• Rail congestion in the USA

Dean Maciuba, Director Consulting Services at Logistics Trends & Insights, joins me to discuss how home delivery fits in with the e-commerce value proposition:

• UPS and FedEx's growing network of access points (PUDOs)
• How UPS and FedEx are using those access points for residential deliveries, including redirections of failed first-time deliveries
• Pressures on delivery drivers
• Residential delivery: what the customer wants
• Customer choice in delivery
• Multiple home delivery attempts
• Porch piracy
• Price pressure on residential delivery, promoting PUDO delivery but being absorbed by e-commerce sellers
• Amazon, home delivery, and losses in delivery
• Rural delivery fees
• Parcel lockers in the USA
• Putting the customer in control of their deliveries (interactive delivery management - IDM)
• Amazon's parcel locker network - including direct delivery to parcel lockers
• Amazon's focus on e-commerce delivery: the customer!
• How Amazon delivers in the last mile
• Amazon volumes going through UPS, FedEx, and the US Postal Service
• Reducing cost in the last mile