Tenfold increase in operations in record time
In a locked-down Norway, with closed schools and hundreds of thousands of employees working from home, the need for deliveries to private addresses during the day quickly increased. PostNord decided to meet the needs with full capacity and an offensive strategy.
The capacity for home deliveries was increased almost tenfold. To achieve this, drivers who normally only delivered to stores also started to handle private home deliveries.
“It was a matter of loading the trucks earlier to also be able to deliver private parcels during office hours. And it worked,” states Ann-Kristin Wik, Traffic Manager for PostNord in Mo i Rana.
Just when the authorities closed large parts of society, PostNord in Norway made a plan to possibly reduce the number of trucks.
“But we quickly saw that things were developing in the completely opposite direction. The demand for private deliveries and MyPack was so great that we had to call in an extra truck to keep up with the large quantities of goods that had to go out.”
Mo i Rana is 25 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle, a seven-hour drive north of Trondheim, in a vibrant industrial environment. PostNord’s terminal, with seven employees, is located in Mo Næringspark. There, we also find more than a hundred other companies with over 2,300 employees, most of them linked to industrial production.
“I was worried that the shutdown would affect a lot of them, and thereby also us. But that was not the case. In fact, the opposite happened. During the most intense coronavirus period, there was not a single truck that was not also carrying goods to private individuals,” explains Ann-Kristin.
She has been working as Traffic Manager in Mo i Rana since July 2019. On a typical stressful day, she guides about 15 vehicles in traffic.
“When I had just started, we had a new hauler, with several new drivers, so my pulse was a little high the first few weeks. When winter came, the E6 highway over Saltfjellet was closed down several times due to snow, and then the coronavirus crisis struck in March… So things have definitely not been boring.”