PUSHING THE ENVELOPE BLOG

When we sort through our mail, most of us don’t give much thought to the laws and regulations organizing the U.S. Postal Service. Throughout the world though, countries have established different postal models to balance access to postal services with financial sustainability. Some posts are focused on mail delivery; for others, mail is a very small part of their business. Some deliver six days a...

The U.S. Postal Service has approximately 300 mail processing facilities. Some of these facilities perform better than others, some perform worse, and some struggle to reach even average performance. Our auditors examined 10 historically low performing facilities to find out why. When selecting the 10 facilities, the audit team looked for facilities that handled at least 1 billion mail pieces in...

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...

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...

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...