Warehousing, Storage and Delivery Services

Tender description

The Post Office Ltd National Stock Centre (NSC) consists of two operations: Warehouse operations and Delivery Services. Warehouse operations includes forecasting, inventory planning and receiving SKUs from suppliers all the way up to delivery of transactional and value stock. Carriage management includes the dispatch of thousands of parcels a year from the stock centre to Post Office locations across the UK. The Post Office distributes stock to branches under an outsourcing arrangement and will continue doing so with a third party courier which will end in 2025/2026. It is anticipated that from the end of the existing outsourcing arrangement, the supplier will be required to undertake logistics services for the remainder of the duration of the contract. In the last operational year the Post Office: -Processes c.900,000 orders per annum through the warehouse. -Delivers c.600,000 of these orders) through next day and 48 hour parcel delivery services to c.11,500 Post Offices nationwide in the UK. -Warehouse holds 2400 SKUs, stores 4500 pallets and receives 16,500 pallets annually. Post Office are seeking to outsource their National Stock Centre operations so that they can benefit in the following ways: Cost o Reduce operating costs to gain better visibility into the cost drivers. o Benefits to changes in volume leading to cost change. Service o Post Office currently operates a legacy paper pick warehouse system and is looking to benefit from moving to a Vendor operating a modern warehouse software platform in order to improve pick accuracy. Capability o Post Office would like to move towards a newer WMS platform with increased functionality and streamlined processes. o Post Office is looking to gain increased visibility of the order within the warehouse, with the ability to see when an order is received, picked, packed and shipped. o Confirm exactly what orders and SKUs have been dispatched on which trailer, ensuring that there is full visibility on what exactly is being sent to which location. Flexibility o What Post Office would like to have by outsourcing their operation is to be able to take advantage of being able to flex their volumes at peak times, reducing it once the peak is over and also benefit from the associated cost flex that is in line with volumes.