Facing the package crowds with tents and wood-string solutions

From consumers to e-commerce companies, everyone is now dealing with the problems surrounding parcel delivery. Where are the bottlenecks and can a solution be expected in the short term? (In short: no.)

The holidays are approaching: the peak season for parcel deliverers. This year, however, transport services are approaching their 'glory days' with hopes and fears. Because no matter how hard they work, there will be delays and extra measures will follow in order not to overload the networks. Processing even more parcels than they already do is an almost impossible task.

In the run-up to the holidays, plenty of gifts, clothing, drinks and food are purchased. And by all the millions of inhabitants of our country at about the same time. This makes this the busiest period of the year for parcel deliverers. Volumes are not twenty or thirty percent higher, but easily rise to four or five times as much as normal. For those reasons, transport services normally start preparing months in advance. Room must be made for that multitude of packages, the processes must be organized creatively. And temporary employment agencies start arranging workers in good time. All this to ensure that transporters are optimally productive during the busiest period of the year.

The challenge

The big problem of 2021: transporters are already performing at their peak. All the extra measures just mentioned are already being applied in the regular process. The sector has grown explosively in the past year. They scaled up. And again. And further. To the point that distribution centers are bursting at the seams. Temporary workers are already being used extensively on a daily basis. In a regular week, parcel services are already under high voltage. It beeps and it creaks.

tents

For their regular work, transporters are already longing for larger distribution centers, let alone for bastions of the package madness around the holidays. Although there is already a lot of focus on larger distribution centers, it takes time to build them: they arrive too late for the holidays. Other measures should provide relief, such as temporary spaces and sometimes even tents. Various transport services are already using tents on grassy fields to realize extra capacity.

Where the input of parcels is normally fully automatically sorted via sorting machines into, for example, 63 regions and directions, this is impossible with the expected large volumes. It takes creative thinking to make an automated process scalable. Smart minds may find smarter solutions, but the most logical solution so far is dividing the process into several parts. first all input manually sort to four directions, and then sort those again manually. That keeps it manageable, but also makes it more laborious. The current busyness is forcing chaos and inefficient processes. Something that package deliverers absolutely shudder at, but do everything they can to prevent.

Forced into inefficiency

Where the input of parcels is normally fully automatically sorted via sorting machines into, for example, 63 regions and directions, this is impossible with the expected large volumes. It takes creative thinking to make an automated process scalable. Smart minds may find smarter solutions, but the most logical solution so far is dividing the process into several parts. first all input manually sort to four directions, and then sort those again manually. That keeps it manageable, but also makes it more laborious. The current busyness is forcing chaos and inefficient processes. Something that package deliverers absolutely shudder at, but do everything they can to prevent.

Bottleneck: staff

As if all that were not enough, there is another major problem: there is also a desperate shortage of personnel. Transport services therefore try to please employment agencies, so that they can hire that one last temporary worker to process parcels. All hands are desperately needed on deck.

Perhaps the biggest bottleneck is the drivers: experienced drivers are hard to find and newcomers can only deliver half the number of parcels because they don't know the routes. So you need a lot of it, but there aren't many. So who will deliver all those packages to the recipients? We will notice in December. One thing is certain: everyone, from sorters to drivers, is doing their utmost to deliver all parcels on time.

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