USPS’s Flats Sequencing System Comes Under Scrutiny

The United States Postal Service's flats sequencing system (FSS)—a $1.3 billion mail-sorting system for magazines and catalogues—was billed as a revolutionary advancement when it was first unveiled a decade ago, to the point that its rollout even included a slickly produced, Hollywood-style movie trailer. "Consistent, reliable, and on-time delivery," "affordable mail service," "intelligence through technology"—what's not to love? Ten years and 100 installations later, FSS is "still falling short of expectations," according to a new report from the USPS Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which raised eyebrows upon its public release earlier this month for its uncharacteristically frank assessment of the postal service's operations. "More troubling," the OIG writes, "is that it's unclear whether processing flats on FSS machines is more cost-efficient than using AFSM [the automated flats sorting machine, FSS's precursor]." While the OIG regularly makes recommendations to the postal service based on its assessments, this felt different, says Rita Cohen, senior VP of legislative and regulatory policy at the MPA (the Association of Magazine Media). “They said they don’t even understand the operational and financial impact of the system," Cohen tells Folio:. "They don’t know that this entire system is less expensive than what they were doing before, which included manual processing." The USPS, in its own strongly worded statement, disputed the OIG's audit, which it called... Continue reading at 'Folio Magazine'

[ Folio Magazine | 2018-08-29 00:00:00 UTC ]
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