SA Post Office says it has cleared its backlog

·29 Nov 2018

The South African Post Office (SAPO) has cleared the backlog in its depots, which affected the delivery of items to customers.

In a statement released on Thursday (29 November), the SAPO said that domestic deliveries have been normalised to fall within regulated standards in the past week, and that these services are back to predictable daily conveyances to their destinations.

“SA Post Office worked tirelessly to resolve the factors causing the processing backlog. It is pleasing to report that these issues have now been addressed and the backlog is resolved,” said CEO Mark Barnes.

“SA Post Office deeply regrets the strain and inconvenience that was caused to our customers during this period.

“The organisation acknowledges that the initial timeframe it communicated as its projected period within which it would resolve the backlog had not accurately anticipated the impact of the additional volumes of inflowing items on its operations resources. The present inflows of items have peaked at 2.8 million items daily,” he said.

The SAPO previously announced that its depots accumulated processing backlogs due to a month-long nationwide industrial action that was resolved in July, as well as the withdrawal of transport services by its suppliers whose payments were delayed.

It said that it has now made permanent operational interventions in the delivery value chain to ensure quicker turnaround times.

“The processing of international mail has improved and the articles that are behind delivery schedules have reduced notably. The volume of international mail on hand is 1.3 million,” said Barnes.

“We expect the processing of international items to be brought within standard once a number of interventions are fully implemented. We have designated a dedicated processing line to speed up the handling of smaller online shopping based items that constitute the bulk of the current international volumes on hand”.