Hermes’ Covid-19 Story

Logistics and Supply Chain News Uncategorized

Hermes UK is looking for over 10.5K ‘parcel people’ to join its business as it invests £100 million to expand its capacity to meet the huge demand created by people shopping at home during lockdown and the continuing growth in the sector. Carl Lyon, Hermes’ Chief Operations Officer spoke to The Logistics Point about what is next for the company.

How do you plan to cope with the increase in online demand and the traditional peak periods like Christmas?

We rely on good information from our retail customers to understand what they need and help predict volumes. We have a very strong central planning team that look at historic volumes, trends, and our network capacity. Flexibility within the network is key to be able to ride the peaks and support our retail customers.

What were the main problems that you faced during the lockdown and how did you deal with them?

From day one keeping our employees and network of couriers safe was key. For office staff this was more straightforward as we decided that they could all work at home and

were able to achieve this in just 3 days.

This is something that often happens during our Christmas peak anyway to make the necessary room for temporary seasonal staff in the building where they can be trained and supervised.

The IT team were on hand to support this with new laptops and to provide the necessary tech support. We did the same for our ParcelShop support teams and our courier help desks.

In the depots we changed all our operating procedures to encompass social distancing in line with government guidelines along with increased hygiene measures. For couriers we implemented strict safety protocols at sub depots and were the first delivery company to introduce contactless deliveries. We have also implemented new safety protocols for our national network of ParcelShops which have seen volumes doubled. The main challenge was to ensure that we had the resources to handle the phenomenal volume of parcels as the UK public turned to home delivery to get what they needed.

Read the full interview with Carl Lyon HERE…

#Hermes #Covid19 #CarlLyon

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.