I don't remember how long ago the news had been spreading about the fact that USPS (United State Postal Service) is on the brink of bankruptcy. One news said that it has lost $16 billion in the last year and $41 billion in the last five. One of the actions to reduce the large deficit that USPS takes is to reduce services, such as canceling Saturday delivery according to the most recent news. Needless to say that it is a very sad story, as post service has been part of our life for very long time.
It turned out that I was the person, among many, who brought USPS into bankruptcy by using its expense services for free. It sounds unbelievable, but very simple to do it. Here is what I did.
My wife has a side business of exporting made-in-USA staff to China. As part of this business, she had quite a few documents and samples to be sent to China. Usually she uses USPS Global EMS (express mail service) for this purpose. She often received, from her partner in China, complaints that the EMS shipping did not arrived in time. As a result of the complaints, I took a step to help her looking into this problem. I found that the receipt from USPS Global EMS has a guaranty of the delivery. If USPS fails to deliver the goods within the guaranteed time, you can file a request for refund. After I found the guaranty on the receipt, I scrutinized every USPS Global EMS shipping to China. It turned out that EVERY USPS EMS shipping to China, in our cases, were not within the guaranteed time. Therefore, I filed every time a refund request. Giving an example, I received the refund of $508.45 in total for five shipping during late of last year. Wow, $508.45 refund. Not only I got refund, my documents/samples had also been delivered by EMS in China except a few days delay (usually the delay is about 1-3 days).
Relating to USPS money losing business, at least two things I believe that USPS should do.
(1) Answer the 3 questions, namely where, how, and why the money has been lost. Of course, technology can help to identify where the problems are, and how the problems happen. The technology here is business intelligence (BI). Yes, using BI gives a comprehensive picture of how business is performing. However, one need to drill down to find the real mechanisms that makes business work or not work. This needs a deep attention from human side.
(2) Continuing from last point, one cannot just stay at the level of knowing the results of business performance. We should identify why the results take place. For example, the management of USPS should not just know that EMS was probably not performing well, or should not just stay at knowing that the total number of refunds resulted from EMS service. USPS management needs to take step further to identify why the refunds happened, and how they happened. By doing this kind of drill down analysis (leveraging BI), the management could probably find that majority of EMS was only delayed by 1-3 days comparing what were guaranteed. Furthermore, USPS should look for why the delivery was delayed. Was it by the shipping from central stations (usually in big city in China) to satellite stations? or by ground transportation schedule? Only based on these kind of detailed analysis, USPS can design a better delivery guaranty for its services, which can help not only its profitability, but also customer expectation and satisfaction.
