US Postal Service 2003 Annual Report Download - page 8

6| 2003 annual report united states postal service
mail – the real kind:
technology at work.
Think about it. Every day, the United States
Postal Service delivers more than 650 million
letters, cards, magazines, packages and cata-
logs to more than 141 million American
families and businesses.
It’s a big job. It’s an important job. And it’s
our goal to do it accurately, on time and on
budget — yours and ours.
We start with 729,000 of the most dedi-
cated career employees in the nation. We add
a liberal dose of technology to cancel stamps,
sort the mail and get it ready for delivery. It
sounds simple, but it’s not.
With a mail volume that’s more than
doubled in the last 25 years, technology has
never been more important to the Postal
Service. It’s helped us manage costs, improve
productivity and keep prices affordable. In
fact, the cost of today’s First-Class stamp,
adjusted for inflation, is less than the 15-cent
stamp of 1979.
It all starts when you drop a letter into any
one of over 300,000 street collection boxes, at
any of our more than 37,000 Post Offices, or
hand it to your letter carrier. From there, your
mail begins its incredible journey through the
world’s most advanced mail-processing envi-
ronment.
First stop? State-of-the-art automated
processing equipment that faces each letter
in the same direction and applies your post-
mark to each stamp. From there, our sortation
control system helps move mail to the right
equipment or processing location.
For letters, our sorting equipment reads
the address, checks it against our master
address list and applies a barcode identifying
the Post Office that will deliver the letter and
the individual carrier route that serves the
address. And it does this quicker than the
blink of an eye.
And our world-class handwriting recogni-
tion program allows equipment to read the
addresses on almost 85 percent of the letters
we handle. Of course, not everyone earned an
“A” in penmanship. So some letters need a
little extra work. But we’re ready for them. Our
remote bar coding system captures a video
image of the envelope and transmits it to a
centralized, remote encoding site, often
hundreds of miles away. There, operators
enter address information, and we can apply a
bar code to the envelope and keep it moving
through our automated processing system.
If your letter is for local delivery, the mail is
sorted and transported to the delivery Post
Office. But for mail going farther, we’ve got to
prepare it for long-distance transportation.
So, before it leaves the local processing facil-
ity, mail is put into trays according to its
destination. Then it passes through equip-
ment that checks the address and assigns it
to the right airline flight or surface transporta-
tion so that it gets delivered on time.
From there, it’s almost home. Once your
mail gets to a processing facility serving the
delivery Post Office, it gets sorted again —
either to the delivery Post Office or right to the
carrier route. This is where those bar codes
really come in handy. Delivery-point automa-
tion takes over, reads the codes and sorts
your mail into the order your letter carrier will
deliver it. Quickly. Easily. Accurately.
Similar technology does many of the same
tasks for packages, larger envelopes, cata-
logs and magazines.
And that’s not all. We’re bringing advanced
technology to our mail-forwarding system,
too. Even if your college roommate doesn’t
know you moved, we’ll make sure your birth-
day card finds you — before it becomes a
belated “Best Wishes!” So, if you’ve filed a
change-of-address notice, we’ll program that
into our address database. And in many
areas, when your card gets processed, our
equipment will know you moved and get it to
the right address. No muss. No fuss. And no
delay. That’s because we won’t have to send
your card to your old Post Office to correct the
address and then forward it.
Your mail is important to you. It’s important
to us. That’s why the men and women of the
United States Postal Service — supported by
the latest and best technology — will continue
to provide you with an unparalleled tradition of
service. It’s what we do.