Maltapost admits it was 'caught out'

Maltapost was caught on the wrong foot by a combination of factors, including insufficient time to settle down to changes launched in September, which resulted in a large backlog of mail in the festive season, chief executive Robert Lake admitted yesterday.

The company's restructuring so close to the festivities, a different mailing pattern than that anticipated by the company, late mailing by customers and the late arrival of overseas mail, as well as extended holidays granted to staff, compounded the situation.

It was a situation that irked many and caused inconvenience to others. Readers contacted The Times to complain about the late arrival of mail, parcels going astray and delays in dealing with customer queries.

The Times sought an explanation from Mr Lake, who declared from the outset that a number of unexpected things "caught us out and as a result we did not deliver the service that we were expected to".

Maltapost therefore wished to apologise to its customers for the delays, he said. However, the backlog had now been cleared, he added.

Change at Maltapost began when Transend, a subsidiary of New Zealand Post, acquired a 35 per cent stake in the company in February 2002 and signed a two-year management agreement with the government, which still holds the other shares.

Last year, the company downsized, shedding 160 employees, re-organised the beats and centralised its mail sorting process, among other changes.

The busiest period during the festive season is between December 9 and 23, when some 5.6 million items - letters, cards, bulky packets and parcels - are collected and distributed.

"We had a difficult Christmas as a result of the changes we were making during 2003. The changes were put in place from September onwards and people were moving out of Maltapost back to the government.

"When we got to Christmas time, in some areas, we were not as settled as we would have wanted to be," he said insisting that this did not reflect in any way on the employees.

"It was just the way we planned and the time that it takes to settle down after you make big changes. It was the first time that we had postmen working on bigger beats and that we had all the mail being processed in Qormi," he said.

Mr Lake said Maltapost had worked out its plan to manage post during the Christmas period after drawing up a pattern based on postal volumes recorded in 2002 and 2001. But this pattern changed a lot this year, for two main reasons.

The first was that people posted their cards and business mail later than they had done in previous years. The second reason was that mail, particularly from the UK and Australia, was held up at UK airports, Heathrow and Gatwick in particular, and Maltapost did not receive the mail until just before Christmas.

Mr Lake said that another development was that a couple of weeks before Christmas, Maltapost was asked, including by the union, to grant leave after Christmas and the New Year. Workers at the branches asked for the two days after Christmas and the New Year to make up four-day breaks on the basis that postmen's beats were much bigger, among other reasons.

Maltapost asked the Malta Communications Authority for permission to grant the breaks and got the go-ahead. All Maltapost workers took holidays from December 25 to the following Sunday and from New Year's Day till January 4.

"We honestly believe that the staff deserved the break as beats today are much bigger than in the past," he said.

"We did not know that the mail was going to come in late and we believed that the situation was being managed adequately. At the point we took the decision, there was no backlog and we did not expect the surge of mail towards the end of the week before Christmas and after," he said.

"I would not have given those two days off had I known what was to happen because then we had a lot of mail and we needed to clear it," he said.

In regard to overtime, the management was careful not to spend where it did not see the need to spend. But when such an unexpectedly big load of mail started to arrive so late it was not a matter of overtime but of sorting facilities not being enough to handle the mail without delays.

Mr Lake said Maltapost would now be carrying out a complete review of the Christmas period and what needed to be done to avoid a repetition. An initial draft report has been produced by the operations personnel to assess what worked and what went wrong.

He admitted that there were some specific aspects that have not worked well, such as registered mail.

Maltapost, he said, has deployed a special project team to look at registered mail and to consult the people that were affected with a view of finding a solution. Changes in this respect will be carried out in the coming weeks after the team's report is completed.

In regard to parcel post, Mr Lake said he was aware that parcels were sent to the wrong locality by mistake; instead of going to St Paul's Bay they ended up in Balzan. But only four or five parcels were involved.

He also replied to criticism about the long time Maltapost took to respond to queries by customers. He said the company responded with urgency to calls by people in respect of mail in Malta but in the case of overseas mail it found it difficult to ensure that postal administrations in certain countries responded promptly. It was taking longer than expected to get responses from overseas and this was causing concern.

"Maltapost is conscious of this and it is taking action to improve the situation locally but as it relates to overseas scenarios we are stuck," he said.

Last year the company and the unions were at loggerheads after Maltapost said it had a surplus of 266 workers, which would hinder its restructuring plan.

In August, the company said it had no choice but to reduce its workforce by 160 employees in order to make the company viable. A total of 127 opted to return to the public sector, after the government stepped in and committed itself to resume responsibility for ex-government employees.

Maltapost, which currently has 620 employees, is now looking ahead to becoming profitable by this year, despite a registered loss of Lm83,000 in 2002.