When it comes to mail, customers want visibility — that much is clear. The U.S. Postal Service’s answer is the Informed Visibility (IV) data analytics platform, which provides customers with full visibility for all mail and packages.
The Postal Service is leveraging this system to compete in today’s marketplace to gain customers’ confidence that mail is still a relevant form of communication. So, it’s an important investment.
It’s hard to argue with the rationale behind rightsizing the postal network. With mail volumes in decline, it made sense for the U.S. Postal Service to see if it could consolidate facilities and equipment.
That’s what USPS did from 2011 to 2015 as part of a two-phased network rationalization plan when it consolidated 223 facilities. As part of Phase II, the Postal Service also revised its First-Class Mail service standards, eliminating overnight delivery for single-piece FCM and shifting some FCM from the two-day service standard to three days.
It has been a dozen years since the U.S. Postal Service introduced the Intelligent Mail barcode (IMb) to sort and track individual letters, cards, and flats. In many ways, the IMb has lived up to its early promise of many tools in a single barcode.
You may have noticed that most of our blogs are based on our recent audit reports, which lets us highlight some of our work and solicit feedback from readers. Stakeholder input often provides ideas for future reports.
In fact, our ideas for audit work must be balanced between stakeholder...
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The U.S. Postal Service owns roughly 8,400 properties and leases more than 23,000 others with annual rents totaling more than $800 million. Yet, the Postal Service has “excess space” — property or space not used or needed.
Under the Federal Property Management Reform Act (FPMRA) of 2016,...
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People love lists.
Our annual blog listing the top ten postal stories of the just-completed year is always a reader favorite — even if a little later than usual this year. This year, as in many past years, we had plenty of topics to choose from. What made this year a little unusual was...
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The U.S. Postal Service currently spends about $4.3 billion annually on highway transportation costs and intends to reduce these transportation costs through various initiatives. Dynamic Routing Optimization (DRO) is an initiative that targets the optimization of USPS Highway Contract Route (...
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The Postal Service has one of the largest transportation and logistics networks in the world, transporting mail and equipment between processing and distribution centers (P&DCs), post offices, or other designated points that receive or dispatch mail. The Postal Service is also one of the...
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The Postal Service partners with the Department of Defense and the Department of State to deliver mail to U.S. military and diplomatic personnel and their families either in the continental U.S. or outside.
The Postal Service’s ability to help facilitate high-quality mail service is...
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