Aan & Ups deDowns top The busy ‘December Month’ began a couple of weeks ago. To make sure that Santa Claus can deliver all presents on time, orders were placed already. One of the companies which contribute to delivering all parcels on time is Dynamic Parcel Distribution (DPD). How does DPD deal with delivering parcels on time? What about the employee occupation and forecast? Does DPD need to hire additional employees? Do the forecasts need to be adjusted? To answer these questions, SCOPE spoke with Jako Bos, director of intercontinental business, about parcels and employee occupation in the busy ‘December Month’. TEXT Sander Roeleven DESIGN Caitlin Riesewijk
DPD: Ups-and-downs in the parcel world DPD is an international franchise network of parcel carriers. The company has been founded in Germany and was originally called ‘Deutscher Paketdienst’. In the Netherlands, DPD is headquartered in Oirschot. The company transports approximately 1.3 billion parcels worldwide each year and approximately 75000 employees work at DPD. DPD also has some basic principles that are important for them. Jako Bos: “Our company is like several other companies; employees, customers, and planet are important for us. Subsequently, making a profit SCOPE DECEMBER 2021
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in order to continue growing is an essential element as well for DPD”. Forecasting is an important element for DPD in its daily operations. Jako Bos explained how the forecast comes about in a ‘regular’ month: “First of all, we ask the sales department what their prediction is on how many parcels will arrive in the coming period. This prediction is compared with the extrapolation of the historical data. A stable process arises throughout the years, except last year when we had to deal with COVID-19. A big peak in demand arose due to COVID-19. This makes it harder to
properly forecast this year because we are faced with a disruption”. Besides forecasting properly, it is also important to have sufficient employees that can execute the work. How does DPD deal with this? Do they, for example, have many freelancers? Jako Bos explained: “It differs per segment. DPD does not have its own trucks or buses. This will all be outsourced by courierand transport companies. In the operations, we work with around 30 percent permanent staff and around 70 percent temporary workers. At the
