Royal Mail Dispatch Manager Online

[cs73]

Does anyone on here use Royal Mail DMO? We have an Online Business Account and currently print labels for our parcels using a Dymo printer and then at the end of the day we have to manually go into the OBA system and enter our postings for the day. My understanding is that DMO takes away some of this duplication, which is great.

However one of the good things about OBA is that it takes the average weight for each post class which often results in us paying less for certain parcels than if we entered them individually. Does anyone know if DMO does this as well, or does the fact that you enter each one individually mean this averaging disappears?

 

[LeeKnowles]

Does anyone on here use Royal Mail DMO? We have an Online Business Account and currently print labels for our parcels using a Dymo printer and then at the end of the day we have to manually go into the OBA system and enter our postings for the day. My understanding is that DMO takes away some of this duplication, which is great.

However one of the good things about OBA is that it takes the average weight for each post class which often results in us paying less for certain parcels than if we entered them individually. Does anyone know if DMO does this as well, or does the fact that you enter each one individually mean this averaging disappears?

I'd be interested to find the answer too, i've just set up an OBA with royal mail!

 

[RogerBa]

I am currently looking at moving to DMO from OBA

My understanding is that daily averages are still used in DMO for RM24 and RM48, however Royal mail are not only trying to get everybody onto DMO (I understand OBA will disappear in time) but also trying to get everybody using Tracked 24 and Tracked 48, this is where you end up paying for each parcel weight individually.
I haven't gone into it fully yet but do understand with DMO you need to input each parcel individually, but that may just be for the tracked services. I've already had a visit and several emails and straight answers are not RM's strength.

BTW at first glance the Tracked 24 or 48 services look very expensive, certainly a huge hike in price from the standard 24 and 48 and you don't even get a signature.

I'd be interested to hear others comments and experiences too.

 

[RachelIonOriginals]

Hi Everyone. I was contacted by Royal Mail to advise that DMO would be replacing OBA.

I have taken a look at the DMO and am very concerned. We are a small business (6 staff), we send around 300 items a day with Royal Mail. There is no way we could create a shipment label for every single item, inputting the dimensions, weight, addresses would be very time consuming! - Using the average weight/size on OBA is perfect for us.

We send items to addresses worldwide. 90% UK, 8% EU, 2% Rest of world.
We use Royal Mail 24 (Letter, Large Letter, Packet, Signed for Packet). As the items we ship are low value we don't use Tracked services.

I have expressed my concerns with Royal Mail who insist the change is compulsory and offered some user guides which explain how to use the online system and provided a number to call re. issues; 08456 047 267. - Not called them yet.

I have a rep coming to see me tomorrow re. tracked service. I will ask him some advice.
RogerBa, you are right, the tracked services are very expensive, we would be better off using UK Mail Next Day!

I will keep updating.

 

[Deggle]

If DMO is planned to replace OBA then I am also very concerned!

We use OBA to dispatch our PPI mail (99% is 1st Large Letter to UK) which is often over 800 items a day - there's no way we can print individual labels for them all (and duplicating those that my extremely streamlined software already produces).

We now use DMO for our 24/48 mail for larger boxes we used to send by UPS as the service is actually acceptable value. However, the system is a pain and I'd much rather those went via OBA too.

I can understand that their revenue protection department would really love each item to be individually booked and barcoded, and for larger parcels I guess that's fine (as with UPS/TNT/etc) - but if they have some long term goal to achieve this for standard 1st/2nd mail, it's not going to happen.

I work in IT, and it always amazes me how poor the RM software/web system is. It's a complete mess, and DMO is not an improvement. I tried to link in with their API to generate all the labels and OBA bookings directly, but the system is such a pain to work with I didn't even entertain spending the time on it. My software downloads a CSV we then upload to OBA and it's actually quite quick... until OBA refuses to generate the form, and then if we're lucky and it does work the barcode wraps onto two lines so the driver can't scan it. Like I said, a mess.

 

[kulture]

I use Linnworks, and it has an excellent interface with OBA. It is the work of a second to print a shipping label, and the work of a couple of minutes to produce the end of day shipping manifest and OBA order. I ship about 100 parcels a day worldwide.

 

[Linn Systems]

To the attention for all Linnworks customers.

I would like to ensure any Linnworks customers in UKFB in advance, that there will be no changes in process with our Royal Mail integration and we will continue to integrate directly with Royal Mail when OBA is retired.

In effect Linnworks will offer the same service as DMO but with all of the multichannel eCommerce integration services on offer.

Kind Regards,

Richard Maxted
Business Development Executive
Linn Systems

 

[RachelIonOriginals]

I have just had a meeting with our extremely helpful and knowledgeable Royal Mail Business Manager.
I have expressed my concerns. We are not alone! He is going to feedback to 'higher up' and get back to us. I'm hoping if enough small businesses currently using OBA 'refuse' to move onto DMO the change will not be made compulsory. The tracking on standard parcels and large letters would be advantageous to us however this would be at a cost to us.

A neighboring eCommerce business recommended Linnworks, which looks to be a fantastic piece of software which we will certainly look at if DMO is made compulsory, however it doesn't support all of our sales channels and therefore some manual input into DMO would still be required.

 

[Linn Systems]

A neighboring eCommerce business recommended Linnworks, which looks to be a fantastic piece of software which we will certainly look at if DMO is made compulsory, however it doesn't support all of our sales channels

Hi RachelionOriginals,

What channels were you looking to integrate? We may not have them listed on our documentation but there is other ways we can pull in orders.

For example we can import information from a CSV file if your selling channel allows CSV export.

Feel free to get in touch I will be happy to discuss this further with you.

Kind Regards,

Richard Maxted
Business Development Executive
Linn Systems

 

[Deggle]

Ok, so I've looked into DMO which does (hopefully) have an improved API we can link into, so that's good news. However, it does seem to me that DMO does not, at all, support standard 1st/2nd mail - where as OBA does (via PPI). Therefore I can only conclude that DMO will not be replacing OBA.

 

[williham]

It absolutely does support standard first and second class mail as well as standard 24/48 large letters and packets.

 

[Deggle]

There seems no mention of this in the API summary. Are these product supported via the usual PPI method (number of items and average weight)? I'm finding this quite confusing - RM haven't even told us anything about it for starters and I thought we'd be considered a medium to high volume user (~800 items a day).

 

[paretowasright]

The issue with DMO is that you need to know the weight and service an order is being sent by before you pack it. OBA makes that easy as you can add up all the different weights and types of
parcel/large letters afterwards