Posts Tagged "postal service"

Cracking the Federal Shipping Code

on Mar 18, 2013 in Products & Services | 10 comments

The federal government ships a considerable number of packages each year, primarily using FedEx and UPS. In fiscal year 2012, federal agencies spent almost $337 million on shipping services through General Services Administration (GSA) contracts. The U.S. Postal Service earned only $4.8 million of that revenue, or less than 2 percent, a recent Office of Inspector General audit report found.

The Postal Service faces several challenges to growing its share of this market. Unlike its competitors, the Postal Service cannot offer necessary discounts to penetrate a market, attract new customers, or match competitors’ prices. In addition, the Postal Service’s lack of a guaranteed 2-day or 3-day express delivery product prevented it from qualifying for one of the GSA’s most lucrative contracts. Priority Mail regularly meets 2-day and 3-day delivery performance (90 percent of the time), but it did not qualify because it does not include a delivery guarantee.

Charging for a New Address?

on Mar 11, 2013 in Ideas Worth Exploring | 9 comments

The U.S. Postal Service adds more than 600,000 new delivery points each year, mostly in the form of new residential homes. While most new residences include cluster boxes rather than to-the-door delivery to reduce costs, delivery remains the Postal Service’s largest cost center.

Canada Post, which has suffered losses recently after years of profits, has introduced a $200 per address charge that it is assessing housing developers for installing community mailboxes. Canada Post claims the charge “is in keeping with how other infrastructure costs are shared by utilities and other services.” Canada Post, which adds almost 200,000 new addresses a year, could earn tens of millions of dollars from the fee and it would offset the added costs of new delivery points. Housing developers in Canada have been fighting the charge, arguing that it is unfair to assess new homes only, which they say receive substandard delivery service compared to older homes and apartment buildings that get delivery to the door.

Go Secure With gopost

on Mar 4, 2013 in Delivery & Collection | 3 comments

Imagine if customers didn’t have to wait at home for a package delivery or have to rush home from work to retrieve a package off their front porch. Or, what if they could avoid paying a fee to receive packages at another address? With 24-hour parcel lockers, their prayers are answered. Last spring, the U.S. Postal Service unveiled gopost™, a self-service parcel locker system. The Postal Service is pilot-testing the 24-hour secured locker systems in the Washington, DC, area at locations such as shopping centers, grocery stores, pharmacies, and transportation hubs.

Capitalizing on Postal Service Trust and Security

on Feb 25, 2013 in Ideas Worth Exploring | 18 comments

The U.S. Postal Service is a key player in a year-long trial of a unique public-private partnership effort that would let citizens securely and voluntarily sign up for online services at multiple agencies using a number of different digital identities. The user would then use whichever password and identity is most convenient – whether the identities are issued by the government or a private company – to log in across multiple government agencies. As the most trusted government agency, and with a 200-year history of security and privacy in delivering mail, the Administration tapped the Postal Service to manage the technology behind the Federal Cloud Credentialing Exchange (FCCX) pilot project. The Postal Service would be taking on a digital version of its role in the physical world, delivering sealed packets of identity data securely between government agencies and identity providers.

Press reports on the pilot project suggest that if it is successful, people might one day be able to change an address online by logging into the Postal Service website with the same passcode or smart card that they use to file taxes with the IRS and buy books on Amazon. But to start, the Postal Service is expected to begin working with suppliers to try the service on test customers, ID providers, and government offices. The FCCX will not store any personal data and will be designed to prevent agency personnel and other participants from tracking citizens’ activity across agencies.

Giving Credit Where Credit is Due?

on Feb 18, 2013 in Pricing & Rates | 6 comments

After more than 20 years of service, the venerable POSTNet barcode on envelopes for automating and sorting mail retired on January 28. The Postal Service now requires that mailings have at least Basic-Service Intelligent Mail barcodes (IMb) to qualify for automation discounts. Mailers will need to switch to Full-Service IMb by January 2014 to receive maximum discounts at that time.

Even though the Postal Service provided a lengthy lead time and a good deal of education on the discontinuance of the POSTNet barcode, the IMb requirement undoubtedly caught some smaller mailers by surprise. At the start of the New Year, less than half of commercial mail contained an IMb, suggesting a sizable number of mailers still needed to make the switch. While large commercial mailers were early adopters of IMb, many mid-sized and smaller mailers were hesitant to make the commitment and investment.