U.S. Postal Service transforms Human Resources to meet the demands of the Information Age

The U.S. Postal Service focus of using the latest technology to make customer transactions quick, easy and convenient is now being extended to its employees. The Postal Service is replacing its existing outdated human resources technology with a fully-integrated system to streamline, standardize and automate HR processes. Once fully implemented, the new system—called PostalPEOPLE—will be the largest of its kind anywhere.

PostalPEOPLE replaces a system that consisted of over 3,800 Postal Service HR professionals relying on more than 200 processes and some 70 systems to support nearly 700,000 employees and facilitate millions of personnel transactions each year. Many of these old systems were at maximum capacity.

“PostalPEOPLE is helping to increase efficiency, reduce costs and provide employees with individualized attention and access to their personnel files and other HR-related information 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” said Anthony Vegliante, Chief Human Resources Officer and Executive Vice President for the Postal Service.

When the Postal Service Transformation Plan was announced in 2002, Postmaster General John E. Potter outlined how the Postal Service would streamline and standardize its operations to improve performance and manage costs. The HR department took a visionary approach and developed a cutting-edge solution built around total employee self-service. The result was PostalPEOPLE, designed to meet the new demands of the information age and a proven success in the initial roll-out sites.

An integral aspect of PostalPEOPLE is the new Shared Services Center in Greensboro, North Carolina. The center is a highly specialized full service facility staffed by career Postal HR personnel specialists and will eventually house approximately 450 employees. “Despite the high-tech nature of the new system, employees who call the Shared Services Center are able to speak directly with a person,“ said Deborah Giannoni-Jackson, Vice President of USPS’s Employee Resource Management office, which oversees the center. “The center provides assistance to employees in identifying problems and offering guidance for PostalPEOPLE transactions that are of a more complex nature,” added Giannoni-Jackson. Employees can also email or fax their questions to the center.

One of the main benefits of PostalPEOPLE is that it allows employees to perform routine HR tasks when it is most convenient for them – either at personnel kiosks located at postal facilities around the country, or away from the workplace through a new online system with a personal computer at home, local library, or internet café. Employees can also call an interactive voice recognition (IVR) system from any location. This 24/7 availability is important because many postal employees work non-traditional hours and don’t have the opportunity to address HR issues from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Another advantage to the new system is that it provides the Postal Service with one view of the employee. HR and payroll systems are being integrated and enhanced so that employee information will now be housed in one area on a highly secured, controlled access mainframe computer.

The Postal Service is in the process of migrating all of its personnel information to PostalPEOPLE. By the end of this August, all employees will be able to use PostalPEOPLE to perform benefit and compensation, retirement, and administrative and executive job vacancy functions. Full deployment of all systems is expected to be complete by next year.

Since 1775, the Postal Service and its predecessor, the Post Office Department, has connected friends, families, neighbors and businesses by mail. It is an independent federal agency that visits more than 144 million homes and businesses every day and is the only service provider delivering to every address in the nation. The Postal Service receives no taxpayer dollars for routine operations, but derives its operating revenues solely from the sale of postage, products and services. With annual revenues of 70 billion USD, it is the world’s leading provider of mailing and delivery services, offering some of the most affordable postage rates in the world. The U.S. Postal Service delivers more than 46 percent of the world’s mail volume—some 212 billion letters, advertisements, periodicals and packages a year—and serves seven million customers each day at its 37,000 retail locations nationwide.