Service Performance Measurement Doesn't Need To Be Rocket Science

The following is a perspective by postal commentator Gene Del Polito for the PostCom Bulletin.

A while ago, I wrote a piece that took note of the lack of modern day mail service standards and service performance measurements for most postal products--a rather curious shortcoming for an enterprise that prominently places the word "Service" within its corporate name. This is not a new issue. Not long ago, PostCom published in its Postal Operations Library a history of the many discussions (from 1984 to the present) that have taken place between the Postal Service and business mailers on service performance measurement.

For whatever reason, whenever a mailer says the words "service performance" or "service measurement," the Postal Service starts talking EXFC (External First-Class Mail Measurement System). No matter how many times it's said, postal officials can't seem to get into their heads that business mailers are not asking the Postal Service to develop EXFC-like measurement systems for Standard or Periodical Mail. Trouble is, EXFC itself has limited utility and comes at too great a cost.

The number one reason is that businesses in the 21st century require mail services that are as reliable and predictable as clockwork. Business mailers build business plans on the assumption that mail entered into the system will be delivered in a timely fashion within a particular number of hours or days. The Postal Service's lack of clockwork-like predictability is the number one reason for repeated industry calls for standards and measurements.

The provision of mail service is every bit as much a part of our nation's economic infrastructure as is the provision of gas and electric, water and sewer, and telecommunication services. Those other services, however, have a demonstrated history of predictability and consistency that mail lacks. When you flip on a light switch, you don't have to wonder if the lights will turn on. They just do. When you twist a sink faucet, you don't stand there wondering if water will flow out. It just does. But when you tender your mail with the Postal Service, you have no way of knowing whether your mail will be delivered in one day, two days, three days, or more. Even worse, you can't even be assured that if your mail took five days to be delivered in January, the same also would be true in May.

Now, I'm sure there will be some within the Postal Service who'd like to contest this contention. The only problem is, the only thing they'll be able to offer in defense is the same kind of "anecdotal" data they criticize mailers for using to show that service problems exist. The simple fact is that with the exception of mailbox-entered, stamped First-Class Mail and single-piece Priority Mail, the Postal Service has no ready method for accounting its own performance.

When business mailers call for objective mail service performance measurement, it does not necessarily mean that they're calling for a top-down, soup-to-nuts EXFC-like service performance measurement scheme. What they really want and need is something that can provide information in accordance with real-world expectations. Postal officials should stop thinking of service performance measurement on some bigger than life scale. No one's asking the Postal Service to send a rocket to the moon. In fact, the essentials of what's needed already are in place--that is, if postal officials are willing to look at their world from a bottom-up rather than a top-down perspective.

Sure, measuring the performance of minimally sorted mail that's entered in a bulk mail center in New Jersey for delivery in Los Angeles may be a sizable task. But how difficult should it be to determine a real-world expectation or the measurement of bulk saturation-density carrier-route Standard Mail that is slated for delivery from the same facility from which it was entered. If mail is entered at a destination delivery unit (DDU) level, what's so hard about determining when it's arrived and when it should be delivered? So, it shouldn't really be so difficult to say with some level of sureness that DDU-entered saturation density, carrier route mail should be expected to be delivered within 48 hours.

Great! That's the first step in making the definition of standards and measurement more granular. The next step would be to determine the expectations for similarly fashioned mail to be delivered if it's entered at destination SCF. The same, then, also could be done with similar mail entered at other points of entry points within the postal chain.

Okay, so this approach doesn't produce a set of standards or measurements that fully satisfies the "entered in New Jersey to be delivered in LA" challenge. Who cares? Most business mailers don't want or need that. In addition, chances are if you told a mailer that his mail could be made "measurable" and "accountable" if it were entered at a near-destination facility, he'd start dropshipping as much mail as he could to gain the benefits of measurement and performance.

Determining when destination-entered mail is introduced into the system should be a piece of cake, particularly with the Postal Service's use of Planet codes and four-state bar codes. The use of RFID would make it even easier to note when destination-entered pallet loads arrive while the truck is still rolling up to the unloading dock.

There are other benefits to bottom-up service standard setting and service performance measurement. As more mailers chose the dropship option to gain the benefits of accountability and consistency, the Postal Service will more quickly note where redundancies will be created by changes in mailer behavior. This should make it much easier for the Postal Service to determine which service functions at various facilities should be consolidated to reduce unwanted redundancies in the system. Having real data in hand should make the job of explaining network realignment to Congress a little easier than it's been thus far.

It's important to note, though, that mailers are not calling for service performance measurement systems that have anything other than a real-world utility. It does business mailers absolutely no good to gain a service performance measurement scheme that has no utility to the Postal Service's efforts to measure and improve its own internal, organizational performance. Rather, what mailers really want and need is for service performance measurement to be secondary to needs of their own but primary to the Postal Service's need to improve operational performance and consistency. In other words, service performance standards and measurement shouldn't be viewed as a need unto itself. Rather, it should be a by-product of the Postal Service's own efforts to improve the quality of the services it renders.

None of this, by the way, is new. Mailers have been trying to tell the Postal Service that a granular, bottom-up approach to measurement is wholly acceptable. The only problem is that the Postal Service doesn't seem to have listened.