U.S. Postal Service

Increasingly, companies large and small are moving toward flexible workforce policies, which allow employees, among other things, to adjust their work schedules to their personal lives as much as possible. In general, the strategic value of such policies is that they help employees establish a...

Emerging markets offer posts a chance to diversify and support their core postal mission. We recently looked at four of these emerging markets – international mail forwarding, continuity shipping, digital printing, and private locked bags – and found the first three offer revenue generating...

The U.S. Postal Service is required to prefund its long-term pension and retiree healthcare liabilities. These liabilities, currently estimated at almost $404 billion, are based on assumptions that are highly uncertain and changeable. Our recent white paper evaluates these assumptions and other...

The U.S. Postal Service has a corporate brand. Its attributes include reliability, convenience, value, and tradition, among other things. Brand valuation is a management tool increasingly used by successful firms to get the most financial benefit from their brands. But unlike many other businesses...

We collaborated with the consulting firm InfoTrends to analyze three months’ worth of customer billing data from a major U.S. utility. We also jointly interviewed executives who manage bill delivery and payment processing to help determine how the utility’s delivery-and-payment costs and customer...

The OIG has conducted a nationally representative quantitative survey on the relative value of some key services provided as part of the universal service obligation (USO). This study is the first of its kind in the United States and was done in conjunction with the market research firm Gallup and...

The U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General (OIG) conducted reviews from FY 2008 through FY 2013 of flat mail issues and Flat Sequencing System concerns. This white paper summarizes results from those reviews and identifies four overarching areas that have affected the cost component of cost...