Australia Post

For more than 200 years, Australia Post has connected Australian communities to each other and the world.

The events of 2020 and the ongoing effects in the logistics industry was something we could never have anticipated. From it however, has come a transformation and a significant step-change for eCommerce in Australia.

Last year, 9 million Australian households shopped online and had product delivered via Australia Post – that’s 82 per cent of all households. Lockdowns had a palpable impact on online shopping, with online purchases in the state of Victoria growing 82 per cent year-on-year.

This significant volume brought with it challenges however, particularly as the surge in volume coincided with some workforce restrictions and a reduction in passenger flights that would ordinarily carry a significant part of that volume interstate.

Tactically we stood up several ‘pop up’ sites to process and collect volume; we hired anything we could get our hands on – trailers, prime movers, containers, trucks, vans. We also chartered up to 17 planes a day so we could keep the parcels and letters moving and recruited a large number of drivers and worked with our business partners to increase their service levels.

We employed measures such as zoning, physical distancing and temperature checks in our facilities, screens at our Post Office counters and many of our people made the switch and began working from home.

In December 2019 we thought we had experienced our biggest peak period ever. Come July 2020, in the height of the second lockdown in Victoria (which we all acknowledge had the harshest restrictions of any state) the team did almost three times as many ‘stops’ - data that is based on our collections and drop offs from our customers, retail stores, business hubs, processing facilities and the new pop-up sites all deployed during this period.

That increase has now levelled off to sit at a monthly level that is still more than double what we were doing in December 2019, but it has required us to consider strategically how we can transform our transport digital footprint to be interoperable across all our fleets and optimise for the future.

Working with our Data Science and Customer Experience teams has also allowed us to target customers based on their freight profile, availability and service results to change the way we collect and/or process their freight. For example our data science team mined processing data for customers with the correct freight profile and time availability to convert to loose load rather than pallets or ULDs. Our Customer Experience team was constantly mining customer manifesting data for early or incorrect details in manifests to reduce the calls into our contact centre. When customer manifesting and delivery details are correct there is a 76% reduction in contacts to our call centre; this became incredibly important during the surge periods in lockdown.

Australia Post has several different fleets including line haul, our local semi and truck fleets and our red van fleet; all with different carrying capacity. Our interoperable program of work and data science capabilities will provide us with the ability to direct the nearest vehicle with capacity to a customer whenever their product is available for collection, thereby putting the customer at the heart of everything we do. This project is currently underway.

Whilst optimising our fleet and responding to customer demands is a focus; one of our biggest learnings from 2020 is around the mental health of our drivers and the ability to keep them safe and engaged during a tough time personally and professionally. Lyxt DriveCam is deployed across our line haul, local semi and truck fleets domestically. This data and footage allows us to have meaningful conversations with our drivers to not only correct behaviour, but offer help and assistance if required.

As always, our people – be it our workforce or our customers – remain our priority, and despite the challenges that recent years have presented, we continue to work hard at serving, safeguarding and supporting them.