UK Mail to invest £21mn to develop new supply chain facilities

UK Mail is to invest over £21mn (€23mn) in three new sites within its network across the UK to support recent and future growth.

Following its acquisition by Deutsche Post DHL Group in December 2016, the company is now handling over 20% more parcel volumes due to increasing levels of imported and domestic traffic from the B2C retail sector.

A new facility in Enfield, North London, will open in October 2017 following investment of £10m (€11.7m). The new site is 70,000 square ft, three times the size of the existing operation in the area, and will process up to 14,000 parcels a day.

In November 2017 UK Mail will also open a purpose built depot in Milton Keynes with an investment of over £11.8mn (€13mn). Parcel handling operations from the existing Milton Keynes site will be migrated over to the new building, which will also incorporate a new, larger customer call centre.

The new facility is three times the size of the existing depot at over 102,000 sq ft and will process up to 20,000 parcels a day.

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Also opening in November is a new site in Aberdeen, double the size of the existing facility serving that area

All three sites are being designed to include state of the art features and equipment, high quality facilities for employees and partly automated sortation systems to improve operational efficiency.

Peter Fuller, UK Mail’s Chief Executive Officer, saysid “This investment in key sites is part of our strategic growth plan for the business. We’ve recently been awarded some major new contracts and we have ambitious targets to continue on this trajectory. To be successful we need to invest in the most effective infrastructure and equipment for our people to increase parcel handling capacity.”

The investment in strategic sites within the UK Mail network follows the recent extension of the company’s national hub in Ryton. The extension includes installation of a partly automated parcel sorting system which will increase the hub’s handling capacity to over 24,000 parcels an hour.