Author: Archive

Magazines Canada makes recommendations to Canada Post review panel

Posted by | Jul 28, 2008 | |

A delegation of representatives from Magazines Canada met with the Canada Post strategic review panel in Toronto to provide six recommendations on what the crown corporation should to do to strengthen its relationship with and improve services for the Canadian magazine industry.

– There should be a “postal contract” between Canada Post and the Federal Government to clarify the crown corporation’s roles and responsibilities.
– An independent regulator should be created to ensure compliance with the “postal – contract” and provide for arbitration of disputes.
– Lettermail rates should rise with actual delivery costs.
– Rate increases should be transparent, timely and predictable.
– Competition should be introduced in magazine delivery.
– istance-related pricing should be put on hold pending the panel’s report.
The delegation also pointed out two key characteristics that make Canada’s magazine industry and mail services unique:

The size of Canada’s landmass relative to the small and dispersed population.
Competition from American magazines due to our proximity to the world’s largest exporter of magazines.

Magazines Canada will submit comprehensive proposal to Canada Post in September. This will also go out to Magazines Canada members.

The Canada Post panel will complete its review in December 2008.

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DMA's Prescott presents UPU Consultative Committee Chairman's report at 24th Universal Postal Congress in Geneva

Posted by | Jul 28, 2008 | |

Direct Marketing Association (DMA) Vice President of International Development Charles Prescott is attending the 24th Universal Postal Congress in Geneva, Switzerland. Prescott also is the chairman of the Universal Postal Union’s (UPU) Consultative Committee (CC).

During his report to the Congress on CC activities, Prescott announced that the Committee, during the next four-year cycle, would focus on address systems and change of address systems, as well as the related subject of sustainable development.

“Addresses are the structural core of the postal system,” Prescott told delegates convened in Geneva. “Consequently, the availability and accuracy of addresses are critical elements in the health of both domestic systems and the international postal network.”

“They are a huge public good, and this asset is used for a large number of important societal purposes,” Prescott said. “In addition to communication, those purposes include land-use planning, public service delivery, emergency response, and so forth. During the coming cycle our Committee intends to explore in depth all the issues surrounding those two themes: available addresses, and accurate addresses.”

Additionally, Prescott said that the CC will focus on the environmental impact of poorly addressed mail, which is one of the UPU’s core postal strategies. Prescott referred to Postmaster General John E. Potter’s goal for the US Postal Service (USPS) to reduce by 50 percent the USD 2 billion problem of undeliverable mail in the US as an indication of the seriousness of the problem.

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Royal Mail unveils details of GBP 1.2bn IT spend (UK)

Posted by | Jul 28, 2008 | |

Royal Mail has lifted the wraps on how it plans to spend up to GBP 1.2bn on IT-related projects over the next three to four years as it fights growing competition from rival delivery services.

Robin Dargue, the group’s Chief Information Officer and Technical Director, told Computer Weekly that a robust IT and logistics infrastructure will allow the company to develop new markets. “Adding IT content to products and services increases their value,” he says.

The crux of Royal Mail is its capacity to deliver the right item to the right person, Dargue says.

This is particularly so in addressing the opportunities offered by the burgeoning online retail sector, which is worth GBP 4.5bn and is set to grow to GBP 28bn by 2011, according to research firm IMRG.

Royal Mail is supplying up to 25,000 Intermec wireless handheld terminals to delivery staff to record customers’ confirmation of the delivery of packages.

It is also installing mail sorting equipment, mobile handsets, delivery vehicles and online systems so that staff and customers will be able to track and trace each item in the system.

Dargue says “flats” – A4 magazines, catalogues and brochures, make up about one in six items of the typical daily mail bag. Royal Mail is installing high-speed sorting machines from Solystic to handle flats at its Langley plant near Heathrow.

It has also ordered upgrades from Siemens for integrated mail processors (IMPs), and replacements from Solystic for automated mail sorters. By March 2008 it had replaced the codemark printers that print machine-readable instructions on mail to speed sorting. So far, it has upgraded 21 IMPs.

Royal Mail hopes these improvements will give it an unequalled logistics system that it can offer to customers in central and local government as well as business.

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Capital One, USPS in NSA dispute

Posted by | Jul 28, 2008 | |

The Postal Regulatory Commission may rule in August on the dispute between Capital One Services Inc. and the US Postal Service, regarding the issu¬ance of a contract between the USPS and the mailer that would provide customized pricing incentives.
Capital One filed a complaint about the negotiated service agreement (NSA) with the PRC on June 19, alleging that the Postal Service “unduly discrimi¬nated” against the company because it was denied a NSA under the same terms as one granted to its competitor, Bank of America Corp.
Terms of the Bank of America NSA, which went into effect April 1, required multiple operational commitments from the company, including implementing the Intelligent Mail barcode and other auto¬mated sorting tools, as well as waiving the physical return of certain First Class Mail and Standard Mail pieces.
The USPS claims that Capital One’s proposed NSA was not identical to that of Bank of America, and that Capital One had not exhausted all good faith negotiations for an NSA before filing the complaint.
A Capital One spokesman declined to comment beyond the company’s com¬plaint filing, which states that the company was denied a NSA that was “functionally equivalent” to that of Bank of America.
Capital One further alleges that the NSA between Bank of America and the USPS used thresholds for mailing dis¬counts based on industry rates from 1998, rather than current NSA baselines.
The USPS has approved a total of nine NSAs, with one extension, since the opportunity began in 2002. Capital One received the first NSA, which was approved, in May 2003. The agreement granted the bank a discount rate on mail volume above an annual total of 1.225 billion pieces for a three-year term. The USPS receives between 50 and 100 requests for NSAs each year, according to a USPS spokesman.

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Postal workers to become mobile Post Offices

Posted by | Jul 26, 2008 | |

Poste Italiane is rolling out a mobile postal service using Italy’s postmen and postwomen. The new service which has already been trialed in Rome, allows customers to top up their mobile phones, send registered mail items and order prescription medicines.

Using a hand-held device, postal workers can even print receipts and the scheme is expected to be adopted throughout most of Italy over the next few years. One advantage of the concept is the ability to track registered letters along the route which it is thought would also work well for legal documents such as court papers.

It is hoped that more services can be added to the scheme over time, once the support structure is in place. The postal prescription service will connect patient, doctor, and pharmacist, making the ordering and delivery of prescription medicines a snap. Whilst it is not expected to replace post offices, the service should prove popular for smaller transactions and is another example of Italy’s drive to modernise the post office network.

Norway Post introduced a door-to-door alcohol service via the post office network in February this year and Royal Mail is already investing in tracking and scanning devices in the UK to improve existing delivery services. It is thought that postal delivery workers in the UK could offer similar services to those being developed by the Italians, and in a liberalised postal market, all postal operators are keen to look at ideas that would offer a commercial advantage as well as protecting the future of postal networks in a declining letters market. The Italians seem to be leading the way.

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Royal Mail says siphoned-off aid claim ‘nonsense’ (UK)

Posted by | Jul 26, 2008 | |

Royal Mail rejected suggestion that millions of pounds of state aid intended to maintain vital rural post office services may be siphoned off to help pay for postal deliveries.
A spokesman for the group said the suggestion in a report from the all-party Commons business and enterprise committee, which sparked outrage among north and north-east MPs, is “complete nonsense”.
He was replying to a special report from the committee which also urged the independent watchdog National Audit Office “investigate the financial arrangements for outreach services”. Tory Chairman Peter Luff said his committee had heard evidence from Post Office Managing Director Alan Cook that the GBP 358million it receives from Royal Mail does not cover the cost of services it provides.
He said: “It is possible that this is down to inefficiency at Post Office Ltd, but it is also possible that it is because Royal Mail Group is inappropriately using Post Office Ltd, which receives some state support, to cross-subsidise its mail services.”
The spokesman said: “It’s complete nonsense to suggest that Royal Mail uses Post Office to subsidise the mails business and as Post Office Ltd made very clear, the issue is that it costs too much to run the post office network at a time when government and other traditional business is falling away.” He said so-called “outreach” services – which the committee feared are underfunded – “are one way to establish a commercially viable and successful business for a SubPostmaster providing services across a number of communities within the funding available from the government.”

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UPU on way to adopting a new Postal Payment Services Agreement

Posted by | Jul 25, 2008 | |

The UPU member countries attending 25th July afternoon’s Committee 6 meeting at the Universal Postal Congress agreed to continue their deliberations on the proposal for a new Postal Payment Services Agreement.

The new Agreement comes with a multilateral framework to facilitate the exchange of money transfers between postal operators, especially by electronic means.

As a result, the current international treaty will be greatly improved. Among other things, the document clearly defines the UPU’s postal payment services, while taking into account the principles of technological neutrality (enabling the interconnection of networks and systems), data confidentiality, the fight against money laundering, the secure handling and transmission of payment orders, consumer protection and the reliability of payments among operators.

Postal payments, a term used to define four kinds of exchanges (cash to cash, cash to account, account to cash and account to account), play an important social role in that they are more accessible and on offer to the public at large, without discrimination. After all, many people, including a large number of migrants, have no access to banking services. This gap is filled by the worldwide postal network, with more than 660,000 post offices, most them located in rural or remote areas.

Developing postal payment services via an electronic network has become a UPU priority. It is widely acknowledged that remittances sent by migrants contribute to development and poverty reduction. The assistance generated by these remittances outstrips State development aid and direct international investments combined, according to Edouard Dayan, Secretary General of the Congress.

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Is the postal sector an essential component of the global economy?

Posted by | Jul 25, 2008 | |

What better way of answering this question, the theme of today’s 24th Universal Postal Congress General Debate, than to take a look at the Brazilian Post’s Exporta Fácil programme.

This programme, launched in 2001 with the help of the Brazilian Government, has enabled 10,000 micro, small and medium-sized businesses to access international markets. It is now easier for Brazilian small businesses to export their goods to other countries, whether they are selling judo kimonos to Japan, mushrooms to Europe, or dog clothing to the United States.

As Brazilian Post’s Paolo Siciliano explains, the programme has cut down the red tape involved in cross-border trade. The previous 26 stages of the process have been reduced to three. The Ministry of Communication worked with Customs, the central bank and other players to make the administrative procedure more flexible. The ministry responsible for postal services also adapted the existing legislation to improve export conditions.

The programme was so successful it was adopted by the Peruvian Post. The Postal Union of the Americas, Spain and Portugal (PUASP) is currently working with the Brazilian Post and the Inter-American Development Bank, which has invested 1.5 million USD, on setting up similar programmes in Argentina, Ecuador and Uruguay by next year. As Serrana Bassini Casco Secretary General of the PUASP, points out, “This programme is strategically very important for the development of Latin America countries.”

The European Union will also be financing the implementation of a project linked to Exporta Fácil for Mercosud, the economic community for South American countries, says Wagner Moreira dos Santos, Under-Secretary responsible for postal services at the Brazilian Ministry of Communication.

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