City Delivery Office Efficiency – Connecticut Valley 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. City carriers are delivering more packages and fewer letters to more addresses each year. To accommodate these changes, the Postal Service must deliver the increased package volume while maintaining efficiency.
In fiscal year (FY) 2014, Connecticut Valley District city carriers delivered over 2.4 billion mailpieces on 3,888 routes to more than 1.9 million delivery points. City delivery office workhours for this period totaled 1,959,793.
Our objective was to assess the office efficiency of city delivery operations in the Connecticut Valley District.
What the OIG Found
The Connecticut Valley District has opportunities to enhance efficiency in city delivery office operations. We found the Connecticut Valley District’s percent to standard, a measurement used to assess office efficiency, was 118.45 percent, 11.36 percentage points above the national average of 107.09 percent. A percent to standard score greater than 100 percent indicates performance is less than the desired standard. In FY 2014, 71 of the Connecticut Valley District’s 213 delivery units (33 percent) used 221,787 more office workhours (or $10.3 million), or about 18 more minutes of office time per day on each city carrier route.
These conditions occurred because mail sometimes arrived late, the mail mix was incorrect, carriers engaged in time wasting practices, integrated operating plans (used to establish appropriate staffing levels and reporting times for carriers) were non-existent, and managers did not enforce policies and procedures. Eliminating the extra workhours would increase overall efficiency at the delivery units and allow a one-time cost avoidance of about $10.3 million in the following year. We also identified inadequate safeguards over stamp stock and money orders valued at $128,255 at eight delivery units. Management immediately initiated corrective action on these matters; therefore, we are not making a recommendation on this issue. What the OIG Recommended
We recommended management eliminate 221,787 workhours at the delivery units. We also recommended management prepare up-to-date integrated operating plans, eliminate inefficient office practices, and ensure adherence to Postal Service supervisor policies and procedures.