Service & Work Sharing Lead USPS's Priorities

Donnelley, one of the nation's largest users of USPS services, offered Congress nine separate recommendations for improving postal operations, including the following:

• Maintain universal service, for economic and social reasons.
• Review of work-sharing practices. Encourage the USPS to engage in more public-/private-sector work sharing to drive productivity. Ensure that work-sharing discounts adequately reflect all of the variable costs these activities actually help the USPS avoid.
• Review of all processing networks. According to Davis, "The upstream process is a major contributing factor to many other problems that plague the USPS. While the entire network should be reviewed, there are savings to be realized in the range of $6 billion to $8 billion if just the upstream process was realigned."
• Establish incentive programs and give the USPS the flexibility and the incentive to implement programs to boost productivity. Here, Davis cited an example in which Donnelley and others reached a co-palletization agreement with the USPS, which took 18 months to conclude and really only resulted in a three-year trial. In the private sector, such a deal would have taken just six to eight weeks, Davis said, adding, "We should not have to work this hard [for something that] benefits our customers, the postal service, and therefore, all users of the system."
• Change the ratemaking process. Eliminate the "politics" of ratemaking, and set rates based on market conditions.