Quailty Outline

GSCM 588: Managing Quality

Week 2 Project Proposal Outline

Archie Nobles

Professor: Walter Mamak

March 11, 2016

GSCM588 Week 2 Project Proposal Outline

1.         Quality Management at the United States Postal Service (USPS)

2.         The United States Postal Service, Post Office or Postal Service (USPS)

3.         Background/overview of organization

• Currently the USPS employees’ approximately 625,113 people as of January 2016. 493,381 of them are career employees, and 131,732 are non-career employees.

• An independent branch of the government that’s solely responsible for providing Postal Service in the country. The chief aim of the United States Postal Service is to provide U.S. public with trusted affordable and universal service. They deliver mail to more addresses in a larger geographical are than any other service in the world. The government, including the President and Congress set forth this mission in 1775 with Benjamin Franklin as the first Postmaster, recognizing the USPS’s important role in commerce and in bringing the nation together. The Postal Service are the only ones obligated to provide all aspects of universal service at affordable prices, unlike other providers.

• Their main service is the delivery of mail. They handle the mailing of letters and packages, sorting and delivering mail, and selling postal products like stamps, mailing supplies and commemoratives. This is rooted in the history of the United States Postal Service and rooted in a single, great principle: that every person in the United States – no matter who, no matter where – has the right to equal access to secure, efficient, and affordable mail service(USPS, 2016).

• The quality processes at the USPS include performance elements that are measurable.  Performance metric systems allows their quality of service to be measured. The areas that can be assessed and measured are: Completeness, usability, reliability, responsiveness, accuracy, flexibility, safety, and satisfaction. The mail preparation quality management is designed in cooperation with industry mailers. Its based upon the following quality methodologies: Malcolm Baldridge Performance Excellence criteria and Total Quality Management. Merging principles of these programs created a new mailing industry benchmark for customer service and product quality.

4.         Introduction to the problem

• There are many quality issues that need to be addressed to help them survive. They have been on the of the most criticized federal operations, accused of bloated bureaucracy and inefficiency. Over the past few years, the use of electronic communication and economy has contributed to putting the agency into financial crisis, as it suffers billion-dollar losses. The Postal Service is the country’s largest civilian employer. During the postal service’s history, relations between labor unions and postal management have often been confrontational. Postal employees work under a highly structured system of rules and management style.

• Calls for privatizing the Postal Service have been the call for time and time again, but hasn’t gained any real traction with lawmakers. There have been a series of proposals to a Congress for ways to avoid bankruptcy.

• The work environments in the post offices and mail processing plants has been one of discourse, because of adversarial labor-management relations at the national level and long-standing quality of work/life issues.

• Despite their accomplishments, the Postal Service has not been able to change its corporate culture, which has been characterized as autocratic.  Employees continue to work in vast mail processing plants and post offices throughout the country under a highly structured system of work rules and a highly autocratic management style.

5.         Opportunities

• There are many potential gains from successful quality management processes at the USPS. There were some reform plans proposed by Lieberman regarding closures, service suspension, and layoffs but one issue that would help would be alleviating the labor management problems. This would help relieve many issues that plague the organization that stem this long-standing labor management problem and increase the quality of service to the public.

• Improving morale throughout the organization as well as correcting the longstanding labor-management issues is a huge area of opportunity.  These issues have multiple causes that are related to the autocratic management style, adversarial employee and union attitudes, along with inadequate performance management systems.  These issues can be reversed and allow opportunities for improvement.

6.         The quality management initiative that would benefit them would be the balanced scorecard.