Helping the industry investigate and reduce Mailmark Missorts Chris Hadlow February 2019

Objective Currently Royal Mail Wholesale sees on average 0.2% of total postings as missorts per month. Royal Mail defines a missort as items seen at the wrong mail centre on the first machine scan. If the items are seen at the wrong mail centre due to an incorrect address being printed on the envelope or barcode this is classed as an addressing error not a missort. We are currently assessing ways in which we can help the industry to reduce the missort level. We feel adding the Container ID to the eManifest in Spare field 10 will help with missort investigations and in future would help reduce missorts. We would really like your feedback on this. Would linking the items to the container on eManifests help with your investigations?

Mail process and potential missort causes Data - Incorrect Address data This can cause physical missorts but Royal Mail classify this as post code inaccuracy. Royal Mail will not raise a missort adjustment will Labels –Mail Producer/ carrier use Incorrect container label Container - Items put in the wrong container by mail producer or consolidator Delivery –Carrier delivers items to the wrong mail centre.

Current Situation Missorts delay the delivery of the mail and this has a negative impact on the recipient and the value of mail as an efficient and effective communications channel. Currently the industry spends time investigating missorts, time that could be better spent on other value adding activity. These investigations can be complicated and may not even uncover or rectify the underlying cause of the missort. From the list of missorts we currently provide via Mailmark reporting you cannot easily identify the specific container those items were in.

What we currently provide The Mailmark item level data below shows you useful information such as the post code of the item and where the item was first seen. This coupled with the Item ID helps with your investigations but does not necessarily give you all the answers. Error Type Item ID Customer Reference Postcode First Seen Mail Centre Batch ID Batch Reference Campaign Name Department  Missort 0000000  Ref -1   EC1A1AA  Gatwick  1234567 RM   

Container ID in Spare field 10 To help with investigating missorts, RM propose that the container ID in spare field 10 in the eManifest becomes mandatory. Adding the container ID to the reports will create a new level of data within Mailmark non compliance reporting and will aid your investigation through the Supply Chain. We will add a new container ID column to the existing Mailmark customer reports for missorts. This idea has come from talking to our customers and recognising that some already populate spare field 10 with the container ID and have found that it helps with their investigations.

Before & after using spare field 10 Current Situation Using spare field 10 Customer needs to manually identify which containers caused the missorts Customers will be able to see the container ID in the spare field 10 column in the missort item level report To identify the container information is time consuming The information in spare field 10 will speed up the investigations Failure to find the container ID means no further investigation/route cause analysis can be undertaken Customers will be able to see the container ID which may help customer to do the root cause analysis i.e. mislabeled/misdelivered container etc. eManifest volume reconciliation investigations can only be done by the company who created the eManifest Having the container ID in spare field 10 will allow better volume reconciliation investigations as the bill payer also can investigate the Zdocket and the eManifest

Next Steps Speak to your Software Supplier to see if you can access Spare field 10. Check to see if there are any processing issues stopping you populate container ID in spare field 10. Let us know if there are any issues making this mandatory change Please send all feedback to chris.hadlow@royalmail.com