City Delivery Office Efficiency – Greensboro District
Background
City delivery office operations cover all duties a U.S. Postal Service letter carrier performs in the office. These duties include casing mail (placing mail in delivery order), preparing parcels for delivery, and retrieving accountable items (keys, postage due, customs duty, and special services mail). City carriers are delivering more packages and fewer letters to more addresses each year. The Postal Service seeks to accommodate these changes while maintaining efficiency.
From fiscal year (FY) 2015, Quarter (Q) 2, through FY 2016, Q1, Greensboro District city carriers delivered over 846 million mailpieces on 1,448 routes to more than 928,000 delivery points. Carriers used over 654,511 city delivery office workhours.
Our objective was to assess the efficiency of city delivery office operations in the Greensboro District.
What the OIG Found
The Greensboro District has opportunities to enhance efficiency in city delivery office operations. From FY 2015, Q2, through FY 2016, Q1, the district’s percent to standard, a measurement used to assess office efficiency, was 117.57 percent. This is 10 percentage points above the national average of 107.55. A percent to standard score greater than 100 indicates performance is less than the desired standard.
For the same period, 18 of the district’s 90 delivery units (20 percent) used 85,304 more office workhours than necessary. This averages about 23 more minutes of office time per day, or 588 more minutes per month, on each city carrier route. These additional workhours cost the district more than $3.73 million annually.
Excess workhours were used because mail sometimes arrived late and the mail mix was sometimes incorrect, or carriers engaged in time-wasting practices. In addition, integrated operating plans (used to establish staffing levels and mail arrival times by type and quantity) were nonexistent, unsigned, or outdated. Finally, managers did not enforce policies and procedures. Eliminating the extra workhours would increase overall efficiency at delivery units and allow a future cost avoidance of about $4.44 million annually.
In FY 2015, the Greensboro District implemented a Lean Six Sigma project to improve the office percent to standard. The goal of the project is to improve productivity, which will lower operating costs for the Postal Service. The project was initially started at the Greensboro City delivery units with plans to replicate it throughout the district. We also identified inadequate safeguards over stamp stock at four delivery units. Because management immediately initiated corrective action on these matters we are not making a recommendation on this issue.
What the OIG Recommended
We recommended management eliminate 85,304 workhours at delivery units by eliminating inefficient office practices, preparing up-to-date integrated operating plans, and ensuring policies and procedures are followed.