NO, THE "END" IS NOT NEAR....IT'S STILL UNDER DEVELOPMENT

Some news and comment from PostCom President Gene Del Polito.

One of the main topics of discussion at the most recent meeting of the PostCom Board of Directors concerned the Postal Service's plans for network redesign (formerly called "Network Integration and Alignment" and now known as "Evolutionary Network Design") and the future of its flat mail processing program. The nature of these discussions had less to do with whether or not the Postal Service was on the right track, and more to do with the need for answers to questions that mailers felt were important to ask.

As the saying goes, "nature abhors a vacuum." Create a vacuum, and something will rush in to fill it. When the vacuum is a lack of clear communication, assumption and suspicion move in to fill the void. Without clear communication from the USPS, mailers can do nothing more that read tea leaves to divine their postal future. It's an ugly process, and it doesn't work well.

So, PostCom sought to do something completely different. It met with top USPS officials to lay before them some of the concerns that have been expressed by many within the mailing industry. PostCom Board chairman Jim O'Brien, PostCom postal policy committee chairman Joe Schick, and I met with the Pat Donahoe (the Deputy Postmaster General) and Bill Galligan (the Postal Service's senior operations v.p.). It was worth the effort.

For instance, Donahoe and Galligan quite readily acknowledged that the plans and design for END really are undergoing re-evaluation. Donahoe noted that the initial END plans were designed with the assumption that the Postal Service's now-aborted delivery point packaging (DPP) program would be the way flat size mail would be handled in the future. Since this initial planning, the Postal Service has abandoned DPP as operationally infeasible and has refocused its flat mail processing strategy around flat sequence sorting (FSS).

FSS will require an entirely different facility design plan than DPP would have required. As a result, the whole question as to whether mail processing facilities should be modeled around the regional processing center (RPC) concept needs to be re-looked at. Flat sequencing machines will have an entirely different facility footprint than DPP would have required. Besides facility design, the whole matter of equipment purchasing needed to be reconsidered and factored into any new network plan.

Both Donahoe and Galligan tried to emphasize in the clearest of ways that the word "evolutionary" in evolutionary network design was truly meant to be just that, i.e., a progressive redesign along the lines of whatever changes to the postal environment might require. The Postal Service's network plans, they said, were far from being set in concrete, and they both emphasized that nothing would be done without sufficient customer input.

Donahoe was particularly candid in his acknowledging that the Postal Service "learned a great deal" about how not to implement network reform during its deployment of APPS. That, he said, was done without sufficient input from the very people that could have told the Postal Service the challenges it was likely to face with its APPS deployment plans.

We discussed at great length the communication challenges the Postal Service faces with its customers. Mailers need the sense of security and certainty that will enable them to effectively plan how they will use mail in the future. Uncertainty, if anything, may hasten their planning to shift a substantial part of their marketing and advertising efforts to alternative pathways.

Donahoe and Galligan understood this quite clearly. Indeed, both suggested that perhaps it was time for us to jointly plan another Flats Summit to facilitate the kind of dialogue that would be necessary to make network evolution mutually beneficial. We agreed to explore this matter more fully in the weeks ahead, and PostCom Chairman Jim O'Brien has made the reconvening of another Flats Summit a priority for the PostCom Education Committee. O'Brien acknowledged that in the absence of the kind of changes that would have accompanied postal reform, attending to ways that could make the present scheme of things work to bring about greater cost-efficiency and service quality improvement would benefit everyone.

So, as should be apparent, time sometimes can be better spent by seeking information to fill a communication vacuum, rather than going off in a corner of one's own in an effort to intuit the truth.