Increase Visibility Across All Product Lines

For many customers, information about the mail is becoming almost as important as the mail itself. The quality and timeliness of information is often a determining factor in the customer's choice of a service provider. In 2006 the 4-state barcode will begin to provide new information about the mail, and enhancements to IBI information will also help. Service improvements for all products will continue to be made and be responsive to customer expectations. Potential adjustments to service levels will be reviewed to assure close alignment with customer expectations, market demand, and cost. As mentioned in Chapter I (Grow Revenue), the Postal Service will provide product visibility throughout the system to enable customers to obtain information about their own mailings, regardless of shape and class.

Expand Service Measurement Capabilities

The Postal Service will continue to measure end-to-end transit time for First-Class Mail to maintain current high levels of service and identify further improvement opportunities. The current system was designed to measure service for single-piece First-Class Mail from the time the mail piece starts its journey at deposit to actual delivery. The Postal Service's goal is to assure that bulk-entered First-Class Mail attains the same high level of service given to single pieces. Standard Mail next-day certain service has been achieved for letter-size mailings entered at the destinating Sectional Center Facility. In addition, the Postal Service makes every effort to meet requested in-home delivery date windows for Standard Mail. Customers currently using CONFIRM or Delivery Confirmation can now track service on their own mailings, and additional reports will become available. The Postal Service also uses these systems with seeded mail to generate diagnostic data.

By combining the passive scanning of the various barcodes with improved start-the-clock acceptance information via improved bulk acceptance systems, it will be possible to measure service performance for all classes. To support service improvements for various commercial products, data from PostalOne!, Delivery Confirmation, CONFIRM, transportation tracking, and product tracking will be integrated and reviewed. In-transit scanning will be enhanced to create better diagnostic data so that bottlenecks can be eliminated throughout the system. This will assist in reducing cycle times over the entire mail supply chain. Priority Mail service strategies to extend current overnight reach will also be explored. In all cases, the objective is to provide highly reliable estimates of service performance while minimizing measurement cost.