Introduction
The Royal Mail Group is one of the UK’s largest companies responsible for the universal mail collection and delivery service in the UK, handling on average 82 million letters, cards and packages every day, rising to 135 million on peak days. After over 360 years of providing service at a sustainable level, there must be efficient management of the operation’s functions to improve profitability with annual sales revenues in 2003 of 8.3 billion. Royal Mail, hereafter referred to as (RM) boasts to have utilized centuries of innovation making their business what it is today. One can only wonder how RM sustains this level of competence over its competitors.
Initially as an organization RM accepted responsibility to formulate a vision or mission on which the goals are based to understand what it wants to achieve. By doing so, creating a strategy through analyzing the current situation in the environment facilitates the accomplishment of their goals which guides the operations. The success of a company requires that work be performed in several activities or functions, with the operations function being central to the organization. However RM admits on their website, that to compete successfully in the open market they need fair regulatory regime and the ability to invest in the modernisation of their business. With continuous improvements in performance, RM operations managers can notably achieve this success while making a difference in their customer service product.
2. a. The role of operations manager in relation to Royal Mail
Firstly Harrison (1996) suggests that “the role of an operations manager can be classified into 3 responsibilities which are process design, work planning and implementation. However many functions inside the RM Group can be related to the operations manager’s role, we should mention that the RM operations manager coordinates the whole system. In order to do these entire tasks the operations manager breaks...