Recently in USPS Category

By Abby Garcia Telleria

The proposed delivery schedule would consist of package delivery Monday through Saturday, and mail delivery Monday through Friday.

But just last month, Congress passed a "continuing resolution" - effectively prohibiting 5-day delivery by ordering the Postal Service to continue Saturday mail delivery.

The move halted the Postal Service's momentum. The USPS' Board of Governors recently voted to shelve the proposed delivery schedule, at least until "legislation is passed that provides the Postal Service with the authority to implement a financially appropriate and responsible delivery schedule."

The Board issued a statement, saying "Congress has left it with no choice but to delay this implementation at this time."

What does this mean now for the Postal Service? "It's not possible for the Postal Service to meet significant cost reduction goals without changing its delivery schedule - any rational analysis of our current financial condition and business options leads to this conclusion," the agency said in a statement.

For now, the Postal Service will reopen negotiations with postal unions to discuss lowering workforce costs, and take actions necessary (read: possible postage rate increases) to reduce costs.

We'll continue to update you on any new developments ... stay tuned!

-- Abby Garcia Telleria is a marketing specialist for Melissa Data.

On February 6, Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe announced that the Postal Service plans to modify Saturday delivery beginning August 5th of this year. Letter mail and periodicals would no longer be delivered on Saturdays, but they would maintain delivery of packages, including vital mail-order medicine as well as other priority and express mail options. Donahoe stated that this common-sense reform would save the Postal Service more than two billion annually.

The current congressional language prohibiting the Saturday change expires March 27. If Congress wants to stop the Postal Service, they'll have to do so before then.

Donahoe said the USPS can work with Congress to address any concerns. The move will eliminate 45 million work hours and 22,500 jobs. It also will allow the USPS to eliminate overtime. All changes will be done without layoffs.

By David Loshin

The address may be complete, all the elements may be valid, the ZIP+4 is the right one, and all values conform to standardized abbreviations ... and still be incorrect if the recipient is not associated with the address!

This is the bigger challenge with address data quality, since address correctness or accuracy is a factor of real-world events that are not necessarily synchronized with your databases. Some level of control is again served by the Postal Service through the NCOA (National Change of Address) data set that is licensed to tools providers.

Checking against the NCOA data set will notify you if an entity linked to a location has self-reported a change of address, and this accommodates a large portion of the address correction issues. However, there are estimates about the percentage of people that moved, and I recall reading a Census Bureau press release about their 2006-2007 statistics noting that 14% of the population moved over the year.

Not all changes propagate to the NCOA file at the right time, and it may take a while before all consumers of that data actually synch up with the NCOA data set. Even if you do a quarterly review, if we trust that 14% statistic, then there is a pretty good chance that by the end of the quarter you will still have a 3-4% inaccuracy rate for mapping entities to locations.

And there are other considerations that are not incorporated into this calculation. For example:

• Individuals change jobs and therefore change business addresses
• Third-party data vendors incorrectly link individuals to locations
• Miskeyed data
• Purposely incorrect data
• Propagation of legacy addresses overwriting updated addresses

This a small sample of challenges. But what it means is that there are many aspects of assessing and assuring the quality and correctness of addresses, and it may be worth reviewing the ways that your organization verify, validate, standardize, and correct location data!

By David Loshin

The next paragraph provides some additional details:

 "A standardized address is one that is fully spelled out, abbreviated by using the Postal Service standard abbreviations (shown in this publication) or as shown in the current Postal Service ZIP+4 file."

A large part of the remainder of the document guides what is valid and what is not valid, as well as the postal standard abbreviations (as mentioned in the definition of standardized). So an address must be complete, which by definition implies that it can be matched with current Postal Service ZIP+4 and City State files.

This match is to obtain the ZIP+4, so the implication is that verification means that a complete address matches the USPS files and has the correct ZIP+4. The address components must be consistent with the postal standard in terms of valid and invalid values. For example, a street address cannot have a number that is outside the range of recognized numbers (that is, if the USPS file says that Main Street goes from 1-104, an address with 109 Main St is invalid). So validation means that the street address is consistent with what is documented by the USPS files. Standardization is also defined by the above reference: it is spelled out, and uses the USPS standard abbreviations.

In turn, the process for address quality would be to:

1) Ensure the address is complete.
2) Ensure that the address values are valid by checking it against the USPS files.
3) Verify the address's ZIP+4 by matching against the USPS fles.
4) Standardize the address according to the USPS standardized abbreviations.

Postal Reform legislation passed the Senate this month, but according to the Postal Service (and who should know better?) S. 1789 falls disappointedly short of restoring the USPS to financial viability.

For the past two years, the Postmaster General and the Board of Governors of the USPS have worked diligently preparing a comprehensive five-year plan to profitability that would enable revenue generation and achieve cost reductions of $20 billion by 2015 - restoring the Postal Service to long-term growth. The USPS is currently losing $25 million a day and has a debt of more than $13 billion.

Following the two days of sessions it took to vote on all the amendments in the bill, PMG Patrick Donahoe stated: "Based on our initial analysis of the legislation passed today, losses would continue in both the short and long term. If this bill were to become law, the Postal Service would be back before the Congress within a few years requesting additional legislative reform."

So where do we go from here? To the House of Representatives with an entirely new bill - H.R. 2309 - and with their own ideas for Postal Reform.

In the meantime? Take a look here at S.1789 to see exactly what the Senators voted for, and against, and then review the USPS Plan to Profitability - 5 Year Business Plan ... It's a good read. After that ... well, we'll keep you posted.