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GCN Home > April 15, 2002 issue

Smart system confirms bulk deliveries

By Jason Miller, GCN Staff

The Postal Service, which has been criticized for its business practices by Congress and the General Accounting Office, is running a pilot that uses IT to better allocate resources, limit overtime for workers and provide businesses with important information about their bulk mail.

For four years, USPS, as a part of its intelligent mail initiatives, has been tracking business mail from more than 200 companies using bar codes called Planet Codes.

“We can look at the information for internal analysis about how the mail is processed,” said Jeff Freeman, manager for planning and integration in the USPS’ Technology Organization. “It lets us know when mail entered the system and we finished processing it. And it lets us know about service problems.”

The bar code, which senders put on a piece of mail above the address, tells postal officials and companies where it is in the system and how long it takes to get through the system. Scanners at 350 mail processing plants across the country read the data and send it to district offices over a postal WAN. Then the information is transmitted to a server running the Confirm application, developed by the Postal Service, to scrub the data and filter it by mailer, district or region. The information is stored on an Oracle database residing on a Sun Solaris server at a center in Eagan, Minn.

The filtered data is sent to USPS management via the Postal Service WAN to client servers over the Internet or to the Postal Service Web site, where users can log on with a password to access their information.

Labor costs account for more than 75 percent of the Postal Service’s total overhead, said Mark Saunders, a USPS spokesman, so knowing where big shipments are in the system makes a difference.

Means business

The benefits for mailers also are important because 80 percent to 90 percent of the 620 million pieces of mail the Postal Service handles daily comes from businesses, Freeman said. Mailers are assigned four digits within the Planet Code for internal tracking. Freeman said by late spring the code will expand to six digits.