Tag: USA

Why is the United States Postal Service, USPS spending billions of dollars to automate product handling and logistics across the nation? Because it’s committed to being the final delivery services for media, books, mail order prescription and other small parcels for the home and businesses delivery service. Their business continues to mushroom and their expanding “small parcel” shipment volume presents USD 100’s of millions in new business opportunity to existing mail pre-sort and parcel processing centers that jump on board and take advantage of this market opportunity.USPS, once considered the “slow boat” of parcel carriers, has installed new technologies and automation throughout its distribution network and private industry mail centers and carriers are now being given larger financial incentives from the USPS to automate and inject the mail and parcels into local delivery centers, thereby improving services while lowering delivery costs. Think of Amazon, and dozens of other high volume shippers of books, DVDs mail order pharmaceuticals, apparel and business-home office products, they all want the six day a week delivery with faster and lower costs provided by the USPS.Using automated parcel sorting systems such as Numina’s NTS(TM) tray sorting technologies, the private sector can intelligently inject mail stream into the USPS automated centers and streamline delivery and costs using automated sorting and electronic manifesting for mail and parcels. It enables the USPS to shortcut its old, labor-intensive, multi-site manual handling of mail and parcels that required shipping and handling as many as three or four times en route to its destination. material handling automation eliminates expensive manual handling, and enables “zone injection” to the closes initial point of distribution such as the USPS SFC (Section Center Facilities) or better yet to a local DDU (Direct Delivery Unit), so letters and parcels avoid all of the sorting and redistribution costs and delays that were so long associated with the old USPS delivery methodology. Numina Group’s mixed mail and small parcel sorting technology enables parcel services and mail processing centers to process anything from a business letters, flats, irregular, bound printed materials, bagged items and parcels in sizes up to 12″ x 18″and 25-lbs on the same hardware. An automated feed system measures and classifies letter or parcel according to size, weight, destination and other rate-related characteristics.

The U-S Postal Service has announced plans to close a postal center in Tampa in March.

A mail processing center in Fayetteville, North Carolina, will also close that month. The agency has closed 43 of its 55 remote encoding centers since 1999 because of improvements in technology. Automated equipment can now read more than 90 percent of mail.

Meanwhile, the Postal Service is expanding a facility in Charleston, West Virginia, and plans to hire more than 100 workers there. The Charleston facility currently employs 350 workers who manually read addresses that automated machines cannot read.

No matter where you are, there’s likely to be a U.S. Post Office nearby. Until recently, that location probably handled its human resources operations a little differently from any other office.

But now the U.S. Postal Service — an organization with nearly 700,000 employees and annual revenue of USD 70 billion — is reaching the first milestones in streamlining its HR operations in an initiative called PostalPeople.

So far, USPS has integrated 73 of its 80 districts into a shared services center that can handle benefits, retirement, separation and management hiring.

The second phase of the project involves upgrading its core HR operation, which consists of 70 systems supporting 200 processes in the 80 districts. Part of the computer code is more than 20 years old and is based on essentially extinct computing languages.

PostalPeople, which kicked off in July 2004, is part of the Postal Service Transformation Plan, launched two years earlier with the goal of increasing efficiency. The Postal Service invested more than USD103 million in PostalPeople. When completed, savings are expected to total USD60 million annually.

The end result will be a self-service HR network that enables employees to do HR transactions electronically, from changing their address to registering for benefits. All of the information will be available in one system serving 37,000 Postal Service locations nationwide.