Quarterly Performance for Single-Piece First-Class Mail®
Service Variance
Mailpieces Delivered Between 01/01/2020 and 03/31/2020

Overview

Beginning FY2019 Q1, service performance for Single-Piece First-Class Mail® is measured through the USPS® internal measurement system. The system combines scanning of mailpieces by postal personnel at randomly selected collection and delivery points with in-process machine scans for all eligible mail to estimate total transit time for the mail. The total transit is comprised of three legs: collection to initial automated processing, known as First Mile; initial processing to final automated processing, known as Processing Duration; and final processing to delivery, known as Last Mile. The estimated transit-time is compared against Single-Piece First-Class Mail® service standards to determine the percent of mail delivered on time.

Scores prior to FY2019 Q1 were calculated via the External First-Class Mail® Measurement System (EXFC). EXFC was an external sampling system that measured the time it took from deposit of mail into a collection box or lobby chute until its delivery to a home or business.

Single-Piece First-Class Mail® parcels were classified as a competitive product effective for pieces mailed on or after September 3, 2017; therefore, Single-Piece First-Class Mail® parcel results are no longer included in Single-Piece First-Class Mail® reporting.

Limitations

Single piece mail that is first observed in incoming processing operations rather than the expected outgoing processing operations is referred to as First Processing Operation Type 2 mail, or FPO2. The volume of FPO2 mail as a proportion of total single-piece volume observed in processing duration in Internal SPM is significantly higher than the proportion observed for pieces sampled in collection or associated from the retail channel, particularly for flats. This is likely due to the inclusion of commercial mail that is sorted to destination and begins processing in incoming sort operations but is not able to be identified as commercial mail. Because FPO2 mail generally experiences longer durations in First Mile than mail first observed in outgoing operations, the higher proportion of FPO2 mail led to scores which were not accurate. FPO2 volume proportions in single-piece processing duration have been weighted for reporting such that they are aligned with the volume proportions observed for pieces in the collection sampling process and retail pieces to improve the measurement accuracy.

Sampling for most high-volume courtesy and business reply mail delivery points was not enabled during the quarter, resulting in very limited representation of the reply mail portion of Single-Piece First-Class Mail® letters/postcards in the Last Mile sample. Due to the very limited data available to measure the overall transit time for this mail, all of the courtesy and business reply mail were excluded from these results. It should be noted that the legacy system did not measure delivery to these delivery points either. This is a deviation to the plan, not a degradation in comparison to the legacy system.

Performance Highlights

In FY2020 Quarter 2, national Single-Piece First-Class Mail® Two-Day performance was 93.0 percent on time and national Three-To-Five Day performance was 83.3 percent on time. The Two-Day performance score was 1.5 points higher than the same period last year. The Three-To-Five-Day performance score was 3.6 points higher than the same period last year.

Nationally, at least 98.3 percent of mail across all service standards was delivered within the service standard plus three days in FY2020 Quarter 2.

In FY2020 Quarter 2 at the district level, there were not any districts that scored at or above the performance target of 96.50 for Two-Day. Salt Lake City had the highest Two-Day performance at 96.1 percent on time. Two-Day performance improved for 52 out of 67 districts compared to the same period last year. Western Pennsylvania had the highest Three-To-Five-Day performance at 87.8 percent on time. Three-To-Five-Day performance improved for 64 districts compared to the same period last year.