Inside the Exeter workplace which never sleeps – except for one day only

We all get post. But have you ever really thought about the process it goes through to end up in your letterbox?

Devon Live was invited into Exeter Mail Centre to see how they’re gearing up for the future.

The huge Royal Mail building in Sowton Industrial Estate has been used by the posting giant since 1993 – before it was in a much smaller premises in St David’s, which has now been turned into student accomodation.

With the way people use the post changing and with more people shopping online, Royal Mail is making some big changes to stay ahead of the curve.

Exeter’s centre has seen a huge increase in the amount of parcels they receive and send – and letters are down around four per cent year on year.

To keep up with the online shopping boom, Royal Mail is investing £1.8bn into their transformation programme, which will see money spent on fully-automated parcel hubs and delivery in less than 24 hours to be in tune with the “night owl” shopping phenomenon.

In Exeter, three new parcel conveyors have been installed this year to help with the influx.

The 350-strong team working both in the centre and out on delivery are still very much part of what keeps the centre running.

In an average week, the Exeter depot handles in the region of four million items on outward mail and it’s around the same figure on inward items.

But the change the mail centre is now seeing is the increase in size and volume of parcels.

Stephen Davis, plant manager for the Exeter Mail Centre, started as a postal cadet with Royal Mail at the age of 16. He’s now been with the company for 29 years.

“The main change for us now is we are moving towards a parcel market – we are starting to invest in some parcel automation so we’ve got some parcel conveyors here which we use.”

He added: “Clearly for us there’s been a huge switch to parcels. We handle 51 per cent of the market in parcels over all, but what we are seeing is a shift in size of the parcels.

“Whereas before [we’d have more] standard letter box parcel, we’re now seeing an awful lot more above shoe box size.”

The 45-year-old said that parcel wise, they’ve delivered bigger items such as dining tables and chairs to surfboards – which used to be very unusal. Now, it’s becoming a far more regular sight in the centre.

The parcel conveyors which are new for 2019 are simple pieces of machinery – but they maximise efficiency.

Parcels are loaded on to a belt, which are then sorted by three members of staff and put into the correct sleeves, or ‘yorks’ as they’re commonly known in the mail centre.

Before, it meant staff had to sort everything by hand, tipping parcels into the yorks.

Another low-tech piece of machinery which helps with larger parcels are the gravity-fed conveyors, which use plastic cylinders to roll larger parcels to the end of a platform for sorting.

Double decker trailers are a relatively new addition, too – the arctic lorries now have two platforms, meaning 110 sleeves can now be driven across the country compared with a previous load size of 45.

Another piece of brilliant technology in the centre is the Culler Facer Canceller – all letters with a stamp get poured into the tumbledryer type machine, which uses a camera to turn the letters the right way up – and it sorts them into piles of first and second class.

Whilst the popularity of letters is dropping, Royal Mail still seems to be a favourite amongst customers – they hold 51 per cent of the parcel market compared to competitors.

“We still seem to be the chosen product – we can’t compete on price – other competitors do it much cheaper than us, so it is all about our quality of service to our customers,” Mr Davis added.

“People talk about the 500 years of Royal Mail, there’s a huge heritage. People trust in their postie and still like to see their postperson walking down the street posting their parcels. People still trust in the brand.”

The Exeter Mail Centre collects post from whole of the EX and TQ postcode area, from Kingsbridge up through to Barnstaple and Ilfracombe.

Between 6am and 10pm the centre is an outward mail centre, then from 10pm it switches over to an inward office, where the post is broken down into the 36 different local delivery office postcodes.

Ironically, it means if someone from Barnstaple sends a letter to someone else in Barnstaple, it will still end up going to Exeter first.

The mail centre closes on one day a year – Christmas Day – but it’s a 24/7 operation across the other 364 days.

And it must be a great place to work, as many of the employees have stuck around for decades.

One member of staff on the night shift has worked there for more than 45 years.

Both Mr Davis and Joe Massey, the service delivery leader for Devon and Cornwall, praised the people who work at Exeter’s centre.

Mr Davis said: “We have an excellent workforce who really care about the business and the customers, which is great.”