PUSHING THE ENVELOPE BLOG

Have you ever been working on a project and come across something that you realize needs immediate attention? That happens to us occasionally, usually during an audit, and it can prompt us to issue a Management Alert right away. For example, while conducting fieldwork for our International Mail Operations and Performance Data project, we found significant operational delays of international outbound packages across all five of the U.S. Postal Service’s International Service Centers. Specifically

Throughout the year we completed a series of audits on mail operations and delayed mail at eight postal processing facilities across the country. As we conducted our work, we began to see a consistent story. So we thought it would be useful to publish a capping report summarizing our results. So, what did we find? Plant managers were focused on manually counting the amount of delayed mail at each facility. While that’s good, this type of counting takes time. Last January, when USPS implement

A lot of things changed in 2020. One was an unprecedented increase in online shopping. People who’d never done it before dove into internet shopping. For those who already shopped online, they shopped more. As a result, the Postal Service, and other parcel delivery companies, quickly adjusted to handle the increase in parcel volume. The Postal Service realized it needed additional transportation in some spots to carry the extra volume. And one way to quickly add more transportation is using some