Let’s plan early for the November rush
Former DPD UK CEO Dwain McDonald explains the upsides of having a ‘Cyber Fortnight’
I had just finished taking part in a virtual ‘This is Us’ event – the welcome event held every six weeks for the hundreds of new starters joining Team DPD. During my session, I talked a lot about the company’s six core values: Honesty, Accountability, Flexibility, Passion, Hard Work and Respect.
These aren’t just nice words on a wall, they define what the company stands for and what the team cares about. They’re the qualities desired when recruiting new people and they describe the attitude you need to have a long career with with the company. In short, the 6 values are DPD’s DNA.
During the event, a new starter said: “Can you give me an example of how you bring the DNA to life?” In this post, I wanted to answer that question by sharing with you just how much these six values matter to the whole team. Not only in terms of how everyone worked together internally, but also in the way the company communicated with customers during these extraordinary times to prepare for a monster Cyber Weekend and Christmas.
Flexing up for Peak – why it’s time to plan for the November rush
We only had 74 working days until the start of Cyber Weekend on Black Friday (27 November). This annual four-day retail extravaganza marks the start of the holiday season and sees Brits spending an estimated £7billion in a bid to bag a bargain for Christmas.
Last year more than 75% of these purchases were made online for delivery to home addresses by DPD and its competitors, and this year, because of the pandemic, I had expected that figure to rise even higher. That’s why DPD predicted carrying 400,000 more parcels on Cyber Tuesday than on the same night last year.
74 days might have seemed a long way off but the truth is that we had been planning for Cyber Weekend since January and fine-tuning plans with customers since May – this is partly how we held ourselves accountable.
Because of a surge in online shopping caused by lockdown, we had 9,000 delivery drivers – 3,000 more than the previous year and we worked hard to recruit another 3,000 before October. the company had also recruited 500 new managers, spent £100m on new vehicles plus another £60m to open 12 new depots and a further £40m on technology.
Despite this unprecedented investment, our Honesty value meant we had reminded retailers that the UK parcels sector still did not the have infinite next-day capacity in the November-December Peak.
That’s why I urged all our customers to plan ahead as far as possible and resist the temptation to leave their logistics until the last minute or to hope that Christmas would save their year.
We had never experienced Christmas in a pandemic year (well not that I can remember) and so any kind of ‘copy-paste-repeat’ approach from 2019 simply would not have worked in 2020. For a start, we had delivered the kinds of volumes in August that we usually didn’t see until November.
And you just couldn’t put all your 2020 eggs in a 4-day (or even a 4-week) basket, cross your fingers and hope for the best in terms of on-time delivery and customer experience.
Why? Because for DPD, 2020’s Cyber Weekend was already a more finely tuned operation than ever before.
Two years ago, in order to ensure we could deliver the best doorstep experience, we had asked customers to make volume forecasts three months in advance – and then stick to them. The vast majority were supportive, appreciated our Honesty, and realised it was the best way to give their own customers a reliable service.
Next level planning
This year, because of the pandemic, the company decided to take planning to the next level.
So for example, when we discussed forecasts with customers, instead of just saying ‘you can send me 10,000 parcels on Cyber Monday’, we now said: ‘We can deliver to your customers on time as long as you can send me 6,000 parcels before 7pm. Of these, we need to receive 3,000 between 11am and 3pm. Then we can handle the final 4,000 after 7pm.”
In order to meet retailers halfway, we were flexible and rejigged our operations so that delivery drivers went out in waves, with the first wave hitting the road at 7am.
Again the more forward-thinking retailers loved our Honesty and saw the whole Cyber project as a partnership based on Respect, where each party aimed for a win-win by sticking to their side of the bargain. We believed this was an accountable approach to the challenge we faced together.
Of course, forecasts can and do change. And thanks to our Intelligent Operations Centre (real-time ‘mission control’ for Peak…) we were still able to offer Flexibility.
For example, if ‘Customer A’ decided they needed less volume than forecast on a given day, the spare sortation capacity could be switched immediately to ‘Customer B’ – who had just requested more of our resource, perhaps because a promotion had gone better than expected.
Facebook fans and the final mile
We know that many of our customers on the doorstep really value the relationship they have with their local DPD Driver. In fact, dozens of them set up Facebook ‘fan pages’ dedicated to the drivers who deliver to their homes.
I’d like to think that this is because we recruited and retained people who showed a genuine Passion for the DPD brand. But in these challenging times, DPD drivers also had to be super-flexible: I asked 2,000 of them to switch to a different route and often a different depot from their usual one. This is because 22% of our postcodes were moved from one site to another this year to handle the impact of COVID-19 and better manage the ‘fall to earth’ – i.e. the areas that received the highest volumes during Peak.
Can we have a ‘Cyber Fortnight’ please?
One of my more forward-looking friends recently asked me what I wanted for Christmas. I replied that I’d like a Cyber Fortnight instead of a Cyber Weekend.
The team is passionate about giving customers a super-consistent performance across the whole of Peak so it would be great if retailers could ‘flatten the curve’ – by going early with their discounts and spreading them over two weeks instead of four days.
By working together to set customer expectations and move volume a little earlier and a little later than normal, then we could keep everyone happy.
Delivering a Dazzling Peak
Back to the ‘new starters’ event. The question I was asked by a new member of DPD, plus the whole experience of preparing for Peak since the outbreak of COVID-19 made me think long and hard about discussions with customers and all our other stakeholders.
So in summary:
- We were 74 days from our biggest ever Peak, and knew it would be Hard Work!
- Flexibility of our team was more crucial than ever before
- It’s a crucial part of DPD’s DNA to set expectations and then be accountable
- We had the Passion to go the extra mile and get it right for the customer
- We must respect each other and treat people how we would like to be treated ourselves
- Honesty is absolutely paramount: providing we shared information and worked together on the common goal of delighting the consumer then it could be a win-win for everyone