Tip of the postbag
IF FINANCIAL CLAIMS paid out by the South African Post Office (SAPO) to individuals who have lost parcels to pilferage were a measure of performance, its management infers that it’s safe for couriers to hedge their bets on its services.
That’s according to SAPO CE Motshoanetsi Lefoka. She says it paid out around R650 000 in claims for its financial year to end-2007 against revenue of R3,5bn. “It’s quite a negligible figure,” she declares.
SA’s scandal-ridden public postal service had until recently shown signs of a complete turnaround, earning it the distinction of SA’s best company for 2007. All that seemed to change – for the worse – when news leaked out two weeks ago that United States online retail giant Amazon.com had dumped SAPO for a private courier company over concerns of pilferage.
Question is: Was the news of Amazon.com’s boycott of SAPO’s services just the tip of the iceberg or were its claims of pilferage blown out of proportion?
Lefoka has strenuously downplayed the impact of the Amazon.com debacle on SAPO’s fortunes. Says Lefoka: “If reports are true then it would only be the US division of Amazon.com that would have moved their business away from SAPO.” She’s quick to remind that SAPO doesn’t have a direct relationship with Amazon as it’s an intermediary. But the fact remains that Amazon.com’s shipment through the US Postal Service (USPS) to SA accounts for around 15% of the US$1,1m/year (R8,8m) the USPS pays SAPO.
Simply put: The decision by Amazon to reroute its shipment to SA to a private courier will wipe off around R1,3m from SAPO’s bottom line. And although the pilferage of parcels is said to have topped its list of complaints, Lefoka dismisses the allegation, claiming SAPO’s security infrastructure at most of its mail sorting centres was above industry standards.
But trade unions and some rivals to SAPO assert that for a public utility that seems obsessed with profit taken at the expense of service delivery, SAPO is mainly to blame for rampant pilferage. The truth is that in its drive to ramp up profit margins through aggressive cost-cutting measures SAPO has outsourced most of its services, including security at its OR Tambo International Airport mail sorting centre, thus compromising the security of its clients’ mail and parcels.
Joe Chauke, president of the Communication Workers’ Union (CWU), which represents SAPO employees, says outsourcing is partly to blame for pilferage in the postal services industry. “Contract and casual workers employed by most security companies are more vulnerable to pilferage, which is why we’re entirely opposed to the casualisation of labour,” he says.
Ken Allen, head of DHL’s Europe, Middle East and Africa region (one of the largest, yet profitable, private couriers operating in SA), also stresses the need to secure clients’ items.
Says Allen: “The reason we’ve gained a 45% mail market share of shipment volumes in the SA market is because we’re able to manage almost the entire mail delivery chain by ourselves. However, when mail is out of our hands we’re still able to monitor that through tracking.” He adds outsourcing the delivery chain does in fact compromise the security of clients’ mail.
However, SAPO must be profitable in order to invest in new technologies and to deter emerging couriers threatening to encroach its main mail revenue source. Although conceding employees were largely to blame for pilferage, Lefoka again leaps to SAPO’s defence. “In some cases we’ve discovered some individuals claiming to have lost parcels – and, in turn, blaming us for poor services – had in fact received such items. And we also have a lot of undelivered mail. That happens when people change addresses but in the process forget to notify us.”
As a precaution, SAPO will soon launch a new security technology that will, by SMSs, notify both SAPO and the recipient of parcels of the handover processes. In addition to existing security infrastructure, Lefoka says SAPO has earmarked R52m to be spent on upgrading cameras in most of its mail sorting centres. A further R8m will be spent on vehicle technology to monitor mail in transit.
Finweek
Loading ...