Our customers Strong customer relationships have been key to our business as we have evolved. We have a diverse customer base covering both the public and private sector and have a strong presence in financial services, utilities, telecoms, retail and ecommerce. We are proud of our ability to sustain long term customer relationships. We secured a seven-year contract renewal, thought to be the longest in the history of the deregulated postal market. We also continue to win new customers, such as the first Northern Ireland Government postal contract which has enabled us to provide new employment opportunities for long term unemployed people and new apprenticeships in the area. During 2016 we completed the integration of our Mail and Parcels sales teams, enabling the sharing of expertise, and strengthening further our Account Management capabilities. By integrating our sales teams we are seeing greater success in cross selling to our customers in all areas from Downstream Access Mail, Doordrop Media and Parcels both in the UK and internationally. This year we achieved our highest customer recommendation score in our annual customer survey. The survey measures Net Promoter Score (NPS) amongst many other performance indicators and has been running for seven years. This year we achieved a score of 34, considered to be excellent compared to our peer group. Investment and operational efficiency Following the management buyout we have continued to invest in the business in order to support our growth plans, deliver operational efficiencies and benefits to our customers. We remain on a strong financial footing to enable investments in our growth areas of Parcels and International Services. In 2016 we increased investment by 43.5%. In terms of our growth areas we invested in a new carrier management and intelligent routing systems for both domestic Parcels and our international requirements. To enable greater capacity for growth we doubled the size of our Belfast depot and, after the year end, we invested in a new super depot in Bolton delivering 30% greater warehouse capacity compared to our current depots. We reviewed our truck and van fleet and current lease agreements and took on 100 new tractor units, all to euro6 standard, and 104 vans, saving 25.6% expenditure on the vans alone. For our operations, we invested in new material handling equipment (forklifts) improving efficiency and saving more than £1m over the next five years. We also reviewed our goods-in system and developed, and invested in, a new process, saving time and improving the process flow.
We maintained our investment in consumables and our IT systems overall. In 2016 this investment focused on re-developing our finance system and delivering a new business information tool both of which will help deliver a better customer experience. Investment in time, to develop a clear and structured supplier management strategy, coupled with an overall focus on maximising efficiency across the business, has enabled us to make significant continued savings into 2017. Our review of transport has resulted in new lease agreements for vans and trucks, changes to our fuel buying strategy and our new approach to buildings leasing (for example moving head office) and accounted for a large proportion of these savings. Operational efficiencies have been delivered as a result of both investment and savings, providing greater capacity, improved quality of service, and an overall lower cost, service offering. At the same time our next day handover quality for 2016 has increased, approaching 98.8% compared to 98.3% in 2015. We are also one of the few companies to have achieved accreditation of ISO9001 under the new 2015 framework. Product development Mailmark (a 2D barcode that carries machine readable information on the user and mail piece) has been live for over three years, which means that the product has been tried, tested and is fully operational within all of our depots. Due to our early adoption and engagement with Royal Mail to make Mailmark a success, we were awarded ‘Mailmark Enabled’ accreditation. Our Parcel services portfolio has expanded to include both tracked and untracked services using our multi carrier approach within the UK and as part of our international service expansion. We are also now in a position to integrate with most of the core ecommerce systems helping deliver a comprehensive offering to online retailers. As part of our development within Doodrop Media we introduced ‘idoordrop’ our 360 degree approach, applying insight and data analytics to target households that fit specific geo-demographic profiles, aimed primarily at marketing and media agencies. The success of this development helped deliver the growth in revenue for Doordrop Media in 2016.
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Strategic Report | Whistl Annual Report 2016
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