Around 70 people, including DES and Austrian Post staff, suppliers and customers including printers, mailing houses and fulfilment houses attended the event on Thursday (17 September), which officially launched Austrian Post’s new UK international wholesale service.

In June, DES, which is based near Heathrow, signed a contract to act as an extra-territorial office of exchange (ETOE) in the UK for Austrian Post, which has around 24,000 staff and a turnover of around €2.5bn (£1.8bn) globally.

DES previously operated as an office-based supply management company that managed international post but has now moved across to a new 929sqm factory that will enable the business to sort and dispatch post and parcels.

The venture cost around £500,000 in total, including the site move and set up of the new operation.

“We were previously outsourcing facility work so this is going to add credibility to our operation and there’s a huge synergy that exists between us,” said DES chief executive Phil Coleman.

“Austrian Post have true expertise in mail management and products and services within mailings as they have several subsidiaries around Europe and manage many complex deliveries. Their expertise, quality and standards really attracted us to them, coupled with the fact that they’re a reputable post office."

He added: “We now handle mail as a postal operator, which is a massive change as we were effectively a customer of such companies previously.

“We have around 15 printers as customers. We haven’t historically focused on print customers because printers would normally work directly with post offices so this is a new market and a new offer that we have for printers.”

Coleman said DES’ USPs include its lean process, fast turnarounds and competitive pricing as well as its PostPort supply chain monitoring software.

The PostPort platform equips the firm’s clients with an audit trail that enables them to log and manage the individual mailings of their clients through each stage of the supply chain, from the moment DES receives the mail or package to the point it is delivered to the recipient.

Affinion International, whose print facility primarily handles the production of high-security documents for a range of banks and credit companies, has been using DES for the past six years. DES handles around 5,000 to 6,000 items of mail a day for the company.

Affinion International senior director for the fulfilment sector Greg Howford said: “DES always make us feel like a prime customer and we get a lot of flexibility from them. They offer an attractive proposition and it’s much more personal than other services.”

Howford added that the PostPort software is one of the major attractions of using DES as sensitive Affinion projects are often heavily regulated by independent audit companies working for customers in the financial services market.

Direct Entry Solutions, which was established in 2003 to provide a wholesale mail distribution service to printers, mailing houses and agencies, has taken on ten new staff to help oversee the new operation, taking its total headcount to 24.

The firm is also planning to take on temporary staff and extend its operating hours in the run up to Christmas to manage the additional seasonal workload.