Picture a series of warehouses, each the size of a football pitch, capable of storing everything from a single sheet of paper to whole suites of office furniture. These “smart” warehouses allow any item of stationery or documentation to be picked and despatched within hours through a complex web of networks and delivered, not only to the door of your business, but actually placed on the relevant employee’s desk.

Alternatively, your company might place an order for six new desks and chairs, and staff will get to work the next day to find the new equipment in place, ready to use, all the packaging removed and even the floor swept.

This “can-do” system represents the new face of Consignia’s logistics wing. It has overhauled its old supply service to the nation’s post offices and is now offering external customers a range of business packages.

As Richard Rogers, its head of market response, explains: “We used an internal re-structuring and the new ways of working within the internal market as a platform to build a parallel system of handling external customers. External customers can be more demanding, so we had to make sure the new systems were in place and working well before we risked offering our services outside the company.

“The plan was for us ‘get beyond the doorstep’ with a whole host of new services. Everyone knows that the Post Office can deliver things, but we are offering much more than that.”

The new-look Consignia Logistics Solutions warehousing complex at Swindon - clean, tidy and with endless corridors, huge office suites and giant warehouses - is the result of a three-year overhaul of the site.

The contents of a former employee’s house were an unexpected find among the stationery and parcels in one of the warehouses when staff started reorganising the site, which covers 400,000 square feet.

Hidden away for years, no one knew what had happened to the hapless member of staff who used his workplace as a personal storage depot. But the fact that bedding, chairs, cutlery and so on had lain undisturbed for so long convinced Tim Hindley, warehouse operations manager, that the re-structuring programme was much needed.

He says: “Business-wise we were in a rut. Our performance was nothing special. We needed to re-energise, and although there were lots of important staff issues to sort out along the way, the overhaul of the warehouse systems turned out to be just the kick-start we needed.”

Around 350 staff work on the site, rising to 450 at times of high demand. It handles around 10,000 orders daily, with staff working a three-shift system over 21 hours. Typically, around 35,000 order lines may be in stock at any given time.

As part of the restructuring, the warehouses have been automated, stock levels are closely monitored, internal costs are down, customer service has improved, and there has been a 450 per cent increase in orders.

Although the customer services centre is teeming with staff, step next door and the warehouse complex is strangely quiet. Just a few workers are needed to keep the operation ticking over. State-of-the-art forklift trucks hurtle up and down the aisles of one warehouse, programmed to go to exactly the right spot to pick up or deliver goods.

In another part of the building, plastic crates - each representing an individual order either from a post office or external customer - trundle along conveyor belts past endless items of stationery, automatically stopping and starting at the required items.

This “smart” warehousing is the core of the new-look logistics business. The latest technology allows on-time and just-in-time despatch and delivery and effective stock handling. Part of the Swindon facility covers the warehousing and distribution needs of the whole Consignia group, from despatching every form customers are likely to see in every sub-post office around the country, to spare parts for machinery and staff uniforms. The warehouse even carries 130 different spares for postal workers’ bicycles.

Orders can be sent via the internet, by post, fax or telesales. Depending on the item, the scale of order and the destination, products can be picked by a variety of methods to meet delivery times. Currently, 99 per cent of orders are delivered on time.

Low stock

Although the company avoids carrying too much stock, it must also be able to respond quickly to unusual surges in demand. As the foot and mouth crisis hit the headlines, for example, Wellington boots were despatched overnight to the thousands of postal workers on rural delivery rounds.

It is this depth and breadth of warehousing, coupled with speedy response and the ability to deliver everything from the smallest order to large-scale deliveries, that Consignia is now using to woo external customers. It has put together several different packages for businesses.

For example, its Branch Direct service started life as bespoke solution for a financial institution that wanted to ease the administrative burden on branch staff, allowing them to focus on customers during the working day.

Under Branch Direct, Consignia offers a tailor-made service to each branch or office of the company. Consignia staff may have keyholder access, for example, which allows them to deliver mail, vouchers, stationery orders and so on during the night. Outgoing mail can be collected at the same time and delivered to other branches, ready for the next day’s business. Internal mail can be sorted and unwanted circulars weeded out - all saving staff time the next day.

The Branch Direct operation uses a dedicated fleet of 350 vehicles and has more than 700 uniformed staff. Customers also have access to a helpdesk which can track and trace deliveries and collections.

Another initiative which has proved popular is the Call and Collect service. This provides major industries, such as office suppliers, computer maintenance companies and appliance service industries, with a large-scale distribution network, coupled with a localised collection service.

Call and Collect was conceived after Consignia bosses held talks with a national engineering company that wanted to set up a central supply store that gave staff easy access with the minimum of paperwork.

The service uses Consignia’s delivery services to offer next-day delivery of equipment or parts to a chosen collection point. A washing machine engineer, for example, can order a vital part one day and pick it up at the collection point (of which there are 1,600 nationwide) the following day. This beats waiting for hours on end for a delivery.

Another new service, Deliver and Build, makes the most of the spare space in Consignia’s Swindon warehouses and uses the Parcelforce service, which has a constant stream of vehicles on the road, making deliveries to the 30,000 branches in the post office network. In this case, a range of office furniture is stored at Swindon. A company in, say, Nottingham might order 10 desks and chairs from the catalogue.

Once an order is placed, the delivery mechanisms swing into action. The order will be despatched from Swindon - via Parcelforce - and delivered to one of its regional offices. A local contractor will then pick up the order, deliver and install it at the company’s premises overnight, ready for use the next day.

“We’re constantly looking at new services that we can offer to external customers, but we want companies to come to use as well,” says Rogers. “We want people to look at our networks and ask ‘can I make use of this infrastructure to help my business?’ Hopefully, we’ll have the right answer.”

Helen Riley is a freelance journalist specialising in business issues