Entries Posted in OIG

  • Top 10 Postal Stories of 2014

    on Jan 5th, 2015 in OIG | 17 comments

    The year 2014 was certainly historic on the postal and logistics front. Alibaba entered the U.S. market with a bang, setting a record with the largest ever U.S. initial public offering. For the first time ever, non-mail revenues exceeded mail revenues for postal administrations around the world. Shippers braced for the full effect of dimensional weight pricing. And the U.S. Postal Service added its name to the growing list of agencies and companies to suffer a data breach.

    All in all, quite an eventful year. OIG staff sifted through the news and put together a top 10 list of postal stories, in reverse order of impact. Share your thoughts and take our poll to vote for your top story.

    10. Staples Taps Out – Under pressure from labor groups, Staples and the Postal Service ended a pilot program to set up mini-post offices in stores. Instead, the 82 Staples pilot locations transitioned into the Postal Service’s long-established Approved Shipper Program, which offers some postal products alongside those of other carriers.

    9. Open Sesame! – China’s biggest e-commerce company Alibaba set a record for the largest U.S. initial public offering ever, raising $25 billion. Alibaba’s CEO said the company plans “aggressive expansion” in the U.S. With any luck, the Postal Service will figure out how to partner with Alibaba too.

    8. Dim Weighting on Shippers – FedEx and UPS announced plans to price all ground parcels based on how much space they take up during transport, a concept known as dimensional weight, or dim weight, pricing. Analysts predict this change will result in the most dramatic rate-spike for shippers in decades. Meanwhile, the Postal Service bucked the trend and lowered most commercial Priority Mail prices in 2014, a move aimed at gaining commercial customers.

    7. A Capital Idea – For the first time in years, the Postal Service has funds to invest in capital projects. Helped by the exigent price increase in January 2014, the Postal Service ended the fiscal year with $1.4 billion in “controllable” income and said it has about $2 billion for capital investment.  

    6. Postal Banking Gets Fresh Look – A raft of media coverage of an OIG paper on postal financial services energizes a lively public policy debate, including a slew of conferences, and puts the idea of postal banking on the menu of possible reforms.

    5. Invasion of the Last Mile – Last mile delivery has gotten crowded with retail giants, such as Walmart and Nordstrom, trying their hands at same-day delivery and/or experimenting with crowdshipping. And smaller players are providing niche delivery services, such as Peapod for grocery delivery or Deliv that shuttles goods from shopping malls to customers.

    4. Amazon Eyes World Domination – The giant e-commerce provider is moving into all aspects of the supply chain and beyond, opening warehouses and distribution centers, offering same-day delivery, testing drones, using bikes, providing cloud services, and after-sales support services. Amazon is also a valuable partner of the Postal Service, collaborating on Sunday delivery and the new grocery delivery test.

    3. New Champion of the World – Non-mail revenues now exceed mail revenues for postal organizations around the world, according to Accenture’s annual report on high-performing posts. This shift indicates how important parcels and other diversified products - representing 52 percent of posts' total revenues - have become to posts.

    2. Madame Postmaster General – Postal Service Chief Operating Officer Megan Brennan is named to succeed retiring Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe. Brennan will be the first female PMG in the Postal Service’s 240-year history.

    1. Hack Attack – The Postal Service joins the growing list of government agencies and corporations to experience a data breach and the repercussions that come with it, including a congressional hearing, customer and employee concern, and some corporate soul-searching. There were almost 61,000 cyber attacks and security breaches across the entire federal government last year, according to a recent White House report. 

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  • Season's Greetings

    on Dec 22nd, 2014 in OIG | 1 comment

     

    Pushing the Envelope wishes our readers a joyful holiday season and a prosperous new year. We will take a break this week, but we encourage you to read over the past year’s blogs and let us know what you think on any of the wide range of topics we covered in 2014. We post comments as they come in, even if you comment on a blog that ran years ago.

    On January 5 we will share our annual list of the Top 10 Postal Stories of the Year – one of our most popular blogs. As always, we look forward to your comments and insights. 

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  • Six Years and Still Going Strong

    on Oct 20th, 2014 in OIG | 15 comments

    As we celebrate our sixth year of blogging, you might think we’ve covered it all. Surely we’ve hit on every postal topic and angle there is, right? Well apparently not. We have a backlog of issues we want to share and people keep giving us excellent insights and feedback.

    Over the years we’ve noticed that, every once in a while, one of our blogs really strikes a chord with our stakeholders. This past year, we had a few of those moments. The first was our blog on the Harry Potter stamp (Will Harry Potter Cast a Spell on Young Stamp Collectors?). We knew the stamp’s release was controversial. But 226 comments? And more than 57,000 views? Stakeholders care a lot about postage stamps, and social media let them express their sentiments. Other blogs that generated heavy commentary were Network Consolidation Reboot (with a record-setting poll response of over 3,700) and The Road to a New Delivery Fleet, with many of the comments coming from current or retired postal workers. This reinforced one of our earliest blogging insights: Postal workers are passionate about the Postal Service, and they have a lot of good ideas to share.

    However, comments alone don’t measure a blog’s impact. Readership is another good indicator of whether a blog topic resonates with stakeholders. We were surprised to discover that sometimes the blogs with the fewest comments actually got the most views. Our blog asking about the role of a chief innovation officer (The Innovation Unit Dilemma) topped more than 23,000 reads, as did our blogs on the Postal Service’s deal with Amazon to deliver on Sundays (No More Day of Rest for Postal Package Delivery) and on same-day delivery (If You Build It, They Will Come. Maybe)

    Finally, we are finding that the blog isn’t the only place where the action is. Facebook and Twitter continue to see a lot of activity. For example, our blog on the Social Security Administration’s return to paper statements lit up on Facebook even though it generated only a handful of blog comments.

    We mention all of this not to toot our own horn, but to remind stakeholders that this blog serves as an important tool to engage with you on issues that affect the Postal Service. Your input matters to us and informs our work. As we toast our 6-year anniversary, we hope you will continue to share your insights, ideas, issues, and concerns.

    What topics would you like to see covered in a blog? 

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