The company HAVE agreed a contract to buy a certain amount of new machinery. They haven't been delivered (or necessarily all built) yet. They aren't the wrong machines, and as far as coping with British conditions, we allow virtually any shape letter to be posted without question; from some no larger than the stamp itself (I've seen plenty of those), through triangular up to brooms, flowers, live insects and blood.
The machine's are going through trials to ensure they ARE right before RM pays the company the money to deliver them.
I think the car industry is a good analogy, as there are still large sections of the business that handle mail manually, and because of that, compared to automation, costly.
There is a large percentage of middle managers that have come through the ranks via nepotism or "do you fancy having a go". There is little or no formal management training for them, and as such they have some very poor/ antiquated practices.
The reason the business is in dire straits, is that we ARE seeing the volumes of mail posted by the general public dropping, and other direct mailing companies (junk mail) are allowed to use our system at a massively reduced cost (roughly 13p per letter).
Also RM took a 13 year holiday from paying into the pension fund (note the employees weren't given that option) because it was told by the tax man that it would be fined if it didn't reduce the size of its pot, and now we find ourselves with a 12 Billion pound pension hole!
