Parcelforce

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Parcelforce Iveco delivery vehicle

Parcelforce (full-name Parcelforce Worldwide) is the parcel delivery arm of the Royal Mail postal service in the UK.

Despite being affiliated with and a subsidiary of the Royal Mail in the UK, Parcelforce has a global parcel delivery capability (through its subsidiary General Logistic Systems) and is a direct competitor of other worldwide delivery brands such as DHL, FedEx and UPS.

In the UK Parcelforce operates a "hub and spoke" system with the national hub based in Coventry. The Coventry site also doubles as the international transfer hub. The company's national hub centre adjacent to Coventry Airport is one of the largest buildings in the UK and is, according to the company, over a quarter-of-a-mile in length.^[1]

The company has come under fire from disgruntled UK customers in the past, dubbing it "Parcelfarce" in colloquial terms for its perceived failure to meet acceptable service levels and "Parcel Thief" for its inability to ensure safe delivery of parcels and all their contents.^[2]^[3]

1 History
2 Losses
3 References
4 External links

[edit] History

The original parcels service started with the advent of the railways and these were operated by the railway companies, with nationalisation the Red Star Parcel operation was born within British Rail. Royal Mail did not operate a parcels service until quite late and up to the ealy 1980's there was a state owned parcel carrier called Roadline.

Parcelforce came into existence in 1990 following a rebranding (in a blaze of publicity) of Royal Mail Parcels (up to that point internally within Royal Mail the business units were known as RML (Royal Mail Letters) and RMP. Many workers within Royal Mail suspected that the Parcels business was being primed for privatisation (Coming at a time when Royal Mail itself had a image makeover where employees were told that Royal Mail was the identity and face of the post Office Group^[4]). The Parcelforce livery was even meant to have been blue and the Royal mail logo and royal cypher was noy meant to been displayed.

[edit] Losses

Traditionally Royal Mail was never able to make a profit from the parcels service, a part from the Datapost product which remained with Parcelforce after re-branding. Because of the plans for privatisation Parcelforce had to divorce itself from Royal Mail's operation, the problem was that in many areas the former Royal Mail Parcels depended on Royal Mail Letters delivery offices to undertake deliveries on RMP's behalf. Because this arrangement stopped, Parcelforce rapidly began to lose money and this made the company less attractive to investors. At one point Parcelforce was offered for sale to a major foreign parcels organisation but this fell through. Because the company could not be sold it was brought back into the closer orgnaisation set up within the Royal Mail Group. It is generally accepted that Parcelforce would only go into private ownership if the Royal Mail group was privatised and only then as part of that group, not a separate entity.