The Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) made available its performance evaluation of the US Postal Service for fiscal year 2018. Each year, the PRC issues its report on how well the USPS met its performance goals along with recommendations.
Chapter 3 contains an evaluation of the Postal Service’s four performance goals for FY 2018:
- High-Quality Service
- Excellent Customer Experiences
- Safe Workplace and Engaged Workforce
- Financial Health
The PRC said the USPS partially met “Excellent Customer Experiences” but failed to meet the first goal, “High-Quality Service.” In a summary chart, the report provides the “Postal Service’s Reasons for Not Meeting Goal” as follows:
“Service disruptions because of extreme weather and natural disasters across the nation; network-wide job realignment and bidding process, which will benefit future operations but limited the ability to quickly normalize operations and return service performance to standards.”
The report delves into Market Dominant products, but details about Competitive products that many online sellers use are not made public. However, the PRC wrote, “The Postal Service also did not meet FY 2018 targets for the non-public Competitive products performance indicators.” (And remember that in September 2017, First-Class Mail Parcels was transferred to the Competitive Price Listing.)
For next year’s goal related to high-quality service, the report states the following under “Postal Service’s FY 2019 Plans and Schedules for Meeting the Goal”:
“Implement operational, technological, and training initiatives to improve the mail delivery process; leverage data analytics and deploy other tools such as Lean Six Sigma; use a more accurate internal Service Performance Measurement system; prioritize capital investments on key infrastructure upgrades.”
It will be interesting to see what postal experts have to say after analyzing the report. You can review the 85-page report plus appendix for yourself on the PRC.gov website (PDF file).
Press release follows:
Today the Postal Regulatory Commission (Commission) issued its analysis of the United States Postal Service (Postal Service) Fiscal Year (FY) 2018 Annual Performance Report (FY 2018 Report) and FY 2019 Performance Plan (FY 2019 Plan). Each year, the Commission must review the Postal Service’s performance goals, evaluate whether the Postal Service met those goals, and offer recommendations regarding the protection or promotion of public policy objectives.
The Commission’s review finds that the FY 2019 Plan and FY 2018 Report retain many improvements made to the prior annual performance plan and annual performance report. The FY 2019 Plan complies with legal requirements and Commission directives to identify program activities and relate them to the performance goals. However, while the FY 2018 Report meets some requirements, it contains several legal compliance issues due to the lack of comparability of FY 2018 targets and results, related issues with comparability of the results from the past three fiscal years, and insufficient explanations for why goals were not met.
The Commission’s analysis also provides an in-depth evaluation of the Postal Service’s four performance goals: 1) High-Quality Service, 2) Excellent Customer Experiences, 3) Safe Workplace and Engaged Workforce, and 4) Financial Health. The Commission finds that the Postal Service either did not meet or only partially met each performance goal in FY 2018. The Commission provides related observations and recommendations for each performance goal to help the Postal Service meet the performance goal and better assess its performance in future years.
The full report, including an appendix of findings and recommendations for each performance goal, is available on the Commission’s website at www.prc.gov.
SOURCE: PRC Press Release
