 Welcome to Episode 200 of the Postal Hub podcast. I'm Ian Kerr. First up, Mada Krajewski from Last Mile Experts and my co-host for the Last Mile Profits video series joins me to talk about how city centres are transforming post-COVID and what this means for the last mile. Then James Hale from the UPU shares some examples of how posts are delivering social services during the pandemic. Joining me on the line is Mada Krajewski from Last Mile Experts. Mada, we've been doing what I think is an interesting series of videos over the past couple of months, posting them on LinkedIn under the banner, the Last Mile Profits. The videos are available on LinkedIn and on YouTube, but we really want people to get involved, don't we? Absolutely, because I think that the material we do is only as good as the input we have, the comments and the questions. And we've been getting some quite staggering feedback from some people as well. Ian, if everybody was as active as the cargo bike lobby... I've called them the cargo bike lobby. I've called them the cargo bike lobby and I'm never going to live that down, I fear. But we had a very interesting discussion about cargo bikes and their applicability and appropriateness in Last Mile Profits, which I just want to go into that before we move on to other things. We just want to promote the videos, but I actually want to talk about this. We are seeing a growing number of cities in Europe as they emerge from lockdown, closing off streets or closing off lanes to traffic. I think this is going to have a tremendous impact on the Last Mile, whether you're a postal operator, a courier, whatever it is. What do you reckon, Marduk? What do you think is going to come out of this and how posts and parcel operates? Do they have to transfer form somehow? Do they have to change their operations to deal with all these bike lanes that are out there and these pedestrian-only zones? Well, absolutely, and if it's like the Polish scenario, and I think it is in many places, electric vehicles can use those bus lanes. So the limitations do not extend to most electric vehicles, and I think that's an important point so that will have influence. But the second thing, and you know what I'm going to say, tell me, what am I going to talk about? Something about out-of-home delivery, I assume. Absolutely, the reality is if you want to deal with it and if you want to maintain capacity, it's all about out-of-home, and if you have any doubt, ask the Chinese, you know, a thing or two about that. And I do think that there'll be more out-of-home delivery if the local councils, the city, what do you call them? The city hall. If they say, or basically whatever, administering the roads and all that, if they say, well, you know what, the Milan City Council says, we're going to have our own set of parcel lockers. We're not just going to shut down the lanes, we're going to put in our own parcel lockers and they're going to be carrier agnostic. I can see that as being something that could start happening across Europe. So that could be an impetus for your favourite topic, carrier agnostic parcel lockers. And I think Ian, it is going to come, it's going to take some time. It will be the most forward-sighted local authorities. We know transport for London for a while has been doing a lot of work in this space. And, you know, let's see where it takes us. The thing that is absolutely clear, post-COVID, the e-commerce boom is going to be even bigger and we cannot maintain capacity operating the way we are. The ecological issues are secondary but it's part of the same picture. It is, it is, there's capacity, there's technology behind things as well. And I know I've been ranting a bit lately about postal operators not giving customers the most customer-centric options when it comes to receiving their deliveries. But there is an environmental aspect to this as well. And we've discussed this on our videos for the last mile profits about the comparative emissions for lockers versus home delivery and all those sorts of things. And there's knock-on effects for things like traffic congestion. I just, I do think that we are at a point where what local authorities are doing in terms of their roads, loading zones, access into green zones, things like that will have a profound impact on the last mile in those areas. And it doesn't mean that you should just plow all of your money and then investing in cargo bike manufacturers, by the way, everybody. In our last video, we asked about having union members and leaders send their comments. I would love to hear from local authorities or smart cities who've done something interesting because they're the guys on the front line. It would be really cool to understand, what are they thinking? Where are they going? Where do they think they might be? Because I've perceived some of these local authorities as just having a war on white vans. I know that sounds like an odd thing to say. But for example, I've seen the messaging put out by some councils in an effort to seem environmentally sensitive, perhaps they're saying, well, we have to cut down on the number of vans in our city centers. Okay, that's great. But how are you going to get the goods to those businesses that need the stock, for example? Or how are you going to deliver the parcels to people who live in the cities? So there has to be this whole sort of thinking about how our beautiful white vans fit into the equation. And we're just talking about the last mile here, everybody. I mean, if you talk to anybody involved in heavy haulage and transport and construction, that'll give you some very colorful opinions on how trucks get access to city centers and building sites. That's another story all together. You know what, though, the concept, Ian, is the same. It's about seeking to rationalize, standardize, share resources, rather than everybody doing their own thing. So I think a lot of the views at the moment that are presented by some of these smart cities make a lot of sense. What would be really great, though, is to have some examples, we could discuss them. Yeah, I'd love to hear some smart cities, people. Contact me, Ian, at thepostallhub.com, leave a message on LinkedIn or on YouTube or wherever you find us and let us know what you think, because there are levers being pushed at the moment in cities that will have profound implications for the last mile. Anyway, getting back to the original point of this discussion, please watch our videos. Please watch our videos. You can find us on LinkedIn. Just search for last mile profits on LinkedIn. You can also find us on YouTube. I'll put a link in the news letter I send out on thepostallhub.com so you can find the videos there one way or another. Martin. What's important is, you know, by asking us questions, watching the videos, liking it, if you like it, then you're helping us continue. We do this pro bono, so it'll be really great to get as much input as possible from you. And if you're an industry supplier and you want to sponsor the videos, you can drop me a line, Ian. It'll be less pro bono even, I like that. Ian at thepostallhub.com is my email address. Mata Krzeczki from Last Mile Experts and the Last Mile Profits. Thanks for joining us today. Thank you, Ian. Thank you, everyone. Joining me on the line is James Hale. James is managing the Postal Social Services Project at the UPU. James, welcome. We're going to get stuck into a whole load of non-parcel related stuff that's happening in the postal world. In particular, services that the posts are providing that really come to light. Come to the fore since the pandemic has hit. James, can you just give us a bit of a background before we get into some examples of what's happening on the ground in various postal operators around the world? What's been happening? Because this is something that you and the team at the UPU have been working on for not just since the pandemic hit, but even last year. Just fill us in on what's been happening there. So for the last, well, for actually quite a few years that the UPU has been involved in developing a series of sustainable development projects and initiatives. And historically, we've really focused on environmental sustainability. So this will see a huge push to reduce the carbon emissions associated with delivery of mail and everything that goes on with involving logistics and delivery networks. But as well as the environmental sustainability aspect, we are very keen to help posts deliver a lot of goals related to human wellbeing. So really, it's this kind of two aspects to our work, the environmental and the social. And so in 2019, we started to develop some projects with some of our partners. We asked ourselves the question, what could we do to support posts who want to diversify? Which is obviously really important. I think in terms of improving the resilience of postal businesses, but also trying to offer social services. And so by that, we mean services around education and health and community wellbeing. And these are things obviously people, there's a demand for those services from the public, but also many national governments have policies that they struggle to implement, let's say related to education and health. And posts are often very well placed to help them implement those policies. And we just mentioned an interesting thing there, which is about the way that not, basically not every post is the same. That whilst we think about the post, just as we could think about the post as an organization that handles letters and now handles letters and parcels. But there is these gigantic post office networks attached to or part all of the posts. And the services that are offered there can vary quite differently depending in part upon the mission of the post on the legislative background to the post and the ownership of the post. And then as you've just said, the government's own goals, shall we say, in terms of delivering services, delivering social service and so on and so forth. How did you go out and find out what was happening out there in the different postal operators around the world? We've actually got funding from the Japanese government to look at this. So we had funding for a year. And the project was divided into, I suppose, a first section was really, as you say, try and find out what's going on. Then we, from this kind of desk study and questionnaires that we developed, the aim was then to use that to develop an analysis and producing best practice guidance. And ultimately to start rolling out a series of pilot projects. And so the initial work involved a questionnaire which we sent out to all our members and we got a very high response rate. So that in itself suggests that this is something that's posed to very interested in. And we asked them some very basic questions because there is really no, there's not lots of data out there. So people have highlighted in the past all the different positive things that posts are doing for communities. But this was really the first time that we were gonna start to get an overview of what was going on. And we had a very high response rate as well. So we had 108 posts replying, which is very high. And out of those 79% said they'd already offer some sort of public or social service in addition to their core business of the mail deliveries. So how do you define a social service though? Is it just the fact that you have a post obviously in a community that otherwise might not have any sort of retail business? Or is it more than that? Is it offering something that somehow classified as a social service was dealing with the elderly or offering government services over the counter or something like that? How do you define it? We had to be quite careful with that because what we didn't want was, as you say, people just using examples of how the presence of the post has helped the community. I think that's very clear and that there's quite a bit of research to show that simply having mail carriers on the street has a positive effect on the neighborhood. There's people's sense of safety, for example, or that people having access to postal deliveries obviously has these economic effects which have spillover effects on people. So I think that's well known and accepted. What we wanted to do is go beyond that and really start to say, okay, how is the post expanding its scope, I suppose, in different countries from this core business to things like providing educational services? So it's quite a lot of different examples we've got. We've got I think just over a hundred examples that were sent in the different things. I mean, Switzerland we're on base now, the post operates a bus service, for example. That's quite unusual. But posts are often involved in awareness campaigns, about all sorts of socially important subjects, delivering medicines, blood donation in post offices, the list goes on and on. And that's, I suppose, one of the benefits of doing this is until we ask, we don't really have a sense of what the posts do. So we didn't give too many categories. With the pandemic hitting earlier this year, how did that change what you were doing? Or did it sort of refocus what you're doing? Around about March, we realized that we started looking at very social media feeds. We started to see that quite a few posts were reacting to this quickly. Essentially, you've got a situation where most of the businesses within some of these countries have effectively stopped operating or they've certainly reduced their activity. So you've got the emergency services and then really you've got the post that is providing an opportunity for people to access services. I mean, it's quite strong. It's quite clear that a lot of the services that were being offered as maybe fringe services or to a relatively small group of people, community, were now in demand by a much larger group of people. So pretty quickly, we realized that this was, we had to respond to this and what we decided to do was pause our main project. We'd already got a sense of all the different services the posts were already offering in terms of social sustainability, let's say. So we then decided, well, let's try and gather all these examples. Let's talk to our members. Let's keep searching on the various news feeds that we have access to and provide like a central location where we can gather all this information. Not being too judgmental, not necessarily saying it's best practice, but saying, look, here is what's happening. As a resource that is obviously very useful to our members because they can actually say, okay, maybe they wanted to introduce a home checking service, for example, for seniors by clicking on the examples that we've got, but we include the links to various articles. They can see that, okay, two or three other posts are offering this and maybe we can learn from them and we don't have to start from scratch effectively. So what are some of the examples that you've seen coming out of this that, through your monitoring of what other posts are doing and the sharing, what are some of the things that various posts are doing that's different when it comes to providing social services or how they've become essential services during the pandemic? So a really good example would be the home checking services that have been offered for quite a while in places like Japan and France. So you have a system where the, because in many countries, the mail carrier is going to people's front door, then that's a great opportunity to provide them with other services and you have a lot of elderly people in some countries who are isolated from their relatives. Just before the pandemic, this is just a demographic reality. So posts have been looking at that as an opportunity to provide a public service but also to generate revenue. And that's something that's quite common, for example, in Japan. What we're seeing is that services like that, other operators are starting to look at these services and implement them. So this is something that happened in Ireland. We actually created a series of what we call technical commentaries which reflect effectively case studies on different operators. And we focused so far on Ireland, France, and Australia. And the first article was about unposted in Ireland because they were very quick off the mark and they worked apparently night and day to try and implement some of these services and quite a variety. So home checking of the elderly is one where you can register yourself or a relative just to have a mail carrier knock on your door and check you're okay. That's people peace of mind. But obviously in the context of COVID that suddenly becomes critical because you have a lot of old people maybe living alone. You can't check on them yourself if you're a relative. So suddenly that becomes quite an important surface for people's health and wellbeing is if mail carriers can do that. And they can also ask, do you need any medicines delivered or do you need some food deliveries? So the mail carriers their role which maybe has been historically the post often played that role in formally checking on people. That's become formalized. And in the context of the pandemic it's there's no one else out there really doing that. So it's kind of raised the profile of these services. The check on neighbor or check on the elderly service is something as you mentioned that La Poste in France has been doing a Jersey post actually had to suspend theirs for a call correctly because of social distancing norms. But anyway, returning to La Poste there's other other things that La Poste has been doing apart from this check on a relative or check on an elderly person service. If you recall, we have these kind of broad categories looking at health, education, wellbeing. And we decided to focus on La Poste because of the educational services that they've introduced. Now, obviously many people are aware many people sitting at home are aware that as well as having to work from home a lot of schools are closed. So a lot of children at home. And the response from schools and education ministries has tended to be, well, you can keep working at home you keep doing your homework, just go online. Your lectures or your classes will be given virtually and you can download the documents which is all fine and good. But there's still quite a lot of people that don't have a computer in the family or if they do, they don't necessarily have internet access. So in France that was identified as a particular issue that even again, before the pandemic there were families who couldn't get online to access educational materials for their children. And the children being assigned homework online. So this was already identified as an issue. So they'd already started to develop some projects. Two projects. One was simply the post was involved in distributing unused school equipment, school computer equipment to families in need. And the second example is slightly more complicated but essentially what happens is it's called homework at home and it's the schools set email La Post the homework and then postal staff print out the homework and post it. I thought you were going to say the postal staff print out the homework and then complete it. In which case, it sounds like a great service. Yes, I'd definitely apply for that. But it sounds slightly convoluted but I can't actually think of an alternative really. If there's people that are being asked to unload their homework and they can't do it and they can't print it out and etc. So the post is stepping in and providing that service and then they return it to these centres within the post by mail using a free envelope and then the postal staff scan those documents and email them back to the schools. So it's a kind of a hybrid between, there's the kind of digital aspect between the posts and the schools and then there's the kind of more traditional way of, I don't know if it's analog but certainly it's a more traditional way of completing your homework on the other side of things. So I think that's a really nice example in the next couple of days, we're going to publish a technical commentary which is really a case study and an analysis that tries to understand how on earth can you put in place a new service so quickly in response to a pandemic because it's typically these projects to roll out over maybe six or seven months and now some of the staff are being asked to put these things in place immediately. So that's the kind of question we're actually asking, we're phoning up and having interviews with various project managers to try and ask how they do that and generally the answer is that they're working very hard, they're working weekends, they're delegating responsibility a little bit more so there's a bit less bureaucracy. So it's been interesting to see that actually how these things, we caught the first article I think it's called behind the scenes done post and it's really to try and understand not just what they're doing but how they managed to do that so quickly. And this is a key point though because posts have a reputation, a well earned reputation in my experience of being slow to move when it comes to bringing out new products or new services. So in some respects the urgency of the pandemic and the need to find solutions and the post's unique position is being a national organization having the post office network having the post delivery network puts them in that position and they're often also deemed to be an essential service so they're continuing to operate in some shape or form during all of this they've been able to learn how to really roll things out quickly. It'll be interesting to see if other posts are able to learn from the examples that you've just mentioned from Unpost or from La Post. We've got a few more minutes just James have another example there of something that's come across your desk or as part of the project that has really piqued your interest. Another example would be from your home country from Australia. Previously I've had contact with several posts about what I would call experienced providers so in terms of social services so we've probably got about 10 or 15 posts worldwide that have got a whole series of different initiatives that they'd already put in place and Australia was one of those posts that had quite a few social services already in place so they were already on our radar. Then we'd noticed that there was an article that was talking about how in Australia how the post had developed a pharmacy home delivery service. Now there's a series of questions that we ask including things like how is this resourced? How did you organize the team to put this in place? One of the questions we ask is who came up with the idea? And the actual initial idea came from the Pharmacy Guild of Australia. So this was a body representing a lot of the pharmacies within Australia and they were lobbying the government to say look we want to respond in some way and then through that contact the post then had a discussion with the government about how they could maybe ease some of the potential pressure on pharmacies but also allow people to stay at home. So if you're ill or if you're vulnerable the last thing you want to do is go to a pharmacy unless you have to because obviously it's a location where you may encounter other people particularly ill people. So they very rapidly within a couple of weeks managed to put in place a home delivery service where people could get their prescription medicine delivered by the post to their front door. And you had to qualify, you had to be there's a whole set of criteria but essentially you had to be identified as being vulnerable. So that based on your age or your medical history but the Australian government put in place very quickly a funding package for that meaning that the pharmacies when they used effectively an adapted express mail service to deliver these medicines and then they could claim back the cost of that delivery from the government in a rebate. So it's quite simple but it was rolled out very quickly and it's something that may well be commercialized in the future because it's obviously very convenient. A lot of people don't have the time or are not particularly interested in going to a pharmacy to collect their medicines. So that's a nice example of how they introduced a service in response to the pandemic very strong benefits for people but also you can see how that helps governments direct because it's part of the government response but also it's helping people and it could be commercialized at a later stage. James, if anybody listening to this wants to find out more about either the project that you're managing there at the UPU, some of the case studies that you've been looking into or if they've even liked to share something that they've been doing in their own country is there information available on the UPU website? Absolutely. So you should be able to get to that webpage from the main landing page of the UPU website. We're really keen to hear about case studies what's basically just examples, what posts are doing. We have lists of examples for social services also for financial services. There's also a section on these technical commentary articles which are quite in depth really focused on a postal audience or a government audience. They're well worth a read and if anyone wants to get in contact with us we have on our webpage a dedicated email address for anyone who wants to find out more about social and financial services. So I'll stick a link on the postal hub.com to the relevant part of the UPU website. We go straight to the UPU website and you should be able to dig it up through there. So lots of really interesting stuff that's really come to the fore. A lot of projects are already underway in some cases or projects have been developed very quickly at the posts as a result of the need to respond to communities during this pandemic. James Hale from the Postal Social Services Unit at the UPU. Thanks for joining us today. Thank you. Coming soon on the Postal Hub podcast, Bertron Spate from Keyzie Tracking on modern parcel tracking and the customer experience. You can subscribe to the podcast on a variety of podcast platforms including Apple podcasts, Spotify and Google podcasts. If you have an email address, put it to good use. Spruce up your email inbox with a weekly burst of Postal Hub goodness. Sign up for the Postal Hub e-news later. It's a weekly email update with the latest podcast and other news. Go to thepostalhub.com and sign up there. If you're on LinkedIn, send me an invitation to connect. I love to hear from podcast listeners when you send that invitation to connect. Include a note to say that you're a podcast listener and that way I'll say yes to your invitation to connect straight away. If you want to contact me about anything at all, maybe you want to suggest a topic for a future episode of the podcast, email me direct at ianatthepostalhub.com. I'm Ian Kerr. Thanks for listening in and look forward to your company next time on the Postal Hub podcast.