How can the financial viability of rural delivery services be improved?

welcome to this last mile profits video the last word on the last mile rural deliveries are really big issue and very difficult to make money on how can we deliver them more efficiently stay tuned experience the future of convenience with modern Expo parcel lockers Cutting Edge innovations that bring parcel delivery to a fundamentally new level follow the link in the description to find the best solution for your business so Gary today we're going to talk about menz's parcels not to be confused with men distribution and have I got it right this is a business that served Scotland and I think the served parel delivery to the highlands and islands of Scotland which is you know some of the most beautiful but most sparsely populated uh areas in in Western Europe basically and the story is apparently they're closing down uh and I think although you know I don't know about you but I don't have enough to be able to talk in detail about that I think it does raise an important and interesting issue you know what do we do in sparsely populated areas uh even more so in sparsely populated areas that are really hard to get to so do you have by the way any background on it before we go into the general a little bit I mean there's there's um the whenever you work in the industry for for as long as kind kind of we have you hear these apocryphal Tales of of interesting Solutions and and some of the islands in the northern part of Scotland might have a population in the in sort of the single and double fig so the chance of having somebody that wants to do deliveries there or is able to do delivery there is pretty zero so with Roy M we knew the guy that was um taking the raw M Parcels across by boat was carrying Parcels for all the other carriers as well so he had all of the handheld device scanners round his belt and he'd climb out of the boat looking like John Wayne coming up the beach with a sack of parcels for everybody or you know highly armed Father Christmas sort of thing so you know Creative Solutions have to be found um but eventually you know you have to look at whether final mild delivery in those communities is the right answer or as as we both firmly believe an out of Home Solution that um is is the one to go for isn't it I think Gary there's two parts to it because one is clearly out of home because out of home gives a lot more efficiency and anyway in places like that I think people are more used to traveling a little bit more than they would do in downtown London uh to to to pick up their parcel um so so part of it I think is the out of home uh but the other part I think is partnering and not trying to go it alone uh exactly as your example showed that you know some cases you have one man serving everyone um the only inefficient bit is if he had to carry four or five pdas because then you lose that efficiency it's it's how formal or informal the collaboration needs to be to make it work but making it cost effective you want these communities to be connected so have access to online shopping because sometimes that being more Choice better price you know and service Etc but if they can't get it delivered um then that's that's really quite unfortunate so it you know finding a way to to collaborate is really good you know a locker placed in a rural community that's serviced by one driver on behalf of all the carriers maybe you're now starting to get to the point where you've got enough density and the stop cost whilst it's going to be higher than a typical stop cost then maybe it can be made to work so so basically and I think this could be an area where carriers can do what generally speaking they're not so Keen to do elsewhere which is cooperate work together because it's a no-brainer either wayse either everybody loses money and probably the customer doesn't have the best quality service or people partner up so it could almost be a blueprint for something that's hard to do elsewhere so so you know carriers partner up and have one uh player perhaps the best placed one or the one with the the most efficient um capability in the given area but the other thing I I think we both also agree is not really likely that it's going to be efficient for that whoever that player is to deliver to people's home addresses probably a lot better to deliver to a Pudo in probably a former post office building um or to a locker yeah exactly I mean it's it's much easier to imagine one vehicle servicing an out of home delivery point you know Pudo or Locker than it is to imagine five or six different carriers running Vehicles up and down country lanes um addressing is an issue finding locations is an issue um some of the lifestyle careers I know from personal experience you know when it's Rose Cottage um and then the name of you know on leafy Lane in in steeple bumpstead um apologies to the people of stle bumpstead but it it it can be very difficult to find so there's you know you could end up driving miles for a single delivery point so bringing that into a community center where where people are visiting more frequently like the PO post office used to do has got to make um a lot more sense I like your example of um Central London by the way I was I was just trying to describe to somebody the other day how 200 M isn't 200 m in London you know I could stand on the corner outside Romo I was building a WRA bone place when I work there I could see four branches of pretto M um just from that corner one of them I had to cross two roads so there was no way I was ever going to go to that one you know 200 meters in in London it's about 100 feet it's a long distance but you know one thing that for me would be interesting because I think we're completely aligned on the idea AA that you have basically uh shared economy type services for places like that but what do you do with a heavy bulky and the only thing I could think of is obviously you're not going to have too many heavy bulky lockers but you could probably have XL pudos to serve those sort of places um because you know it's not all going to be nice small light Parcels you're going to have to place like that you will have sometimes something a bit bigger so maybe that's the way that you you have a shared service and a shared EX sell Pudo in a place like that and probably that would work what you Reon yeah definitely I think you got to think wider about the sort of organizations you'd ask to to be your Pudo the solutions might be literally agricultural you know so maybe there are um you know it's a different type of retail in some of the rural communities you know much bigger shop selling much broader range of goods and not a neat little corner shop um as we imagine elsewhere in the country so yeah definitely I think but creativity collaboration and finding ways to serve it the other the other organization that we work with closely is perator in Canada so if you imagine this issue and then multiply it across the largest country in the world to some of the most really really sparsely populated places that's an organization that's really had to dig deep and find ways to serve its Community well thanks for watching this last mile profits video for more upto-date Last Mile news and Analysis subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow us on LinkedIn