UPU and Revenue Protection. Get Paid!
By[The following blog is provided by the Chair of the Working Group on Postal Revenue Protection of the Consultative Committee of the Universal Postal Union (UPU), Jean-Philippe Ducasse of Pitney-Bowes, Inc . It provides a valuable insight into a project which is representative of the work of the Committee, which represents companies and associations having an interest in the mission of the UPU.
It may come as a surprise to readers, but postal systems are very complex entities when it comes to income collection. The business is not very straightforward. At the counter, you hand over a letter and it’s measured and you pay for it. For the bulk of a busy post, that is a minor part of their business. For example, when a big truck pulls up to the loading dock in a sortation center with several tons of pre-franked mail, personnel don’t have the time or the equipment to check them all and have to rely on paper work prepared by mailers for the count. Auditing, verifying, confirming that the right amount is paid can be complex and sometimes impossible in the rush of the business. “Revenue protection” is thus a subject of immense importance, especially in this economic period. Editor.]
The UPU remains to this day the only global forum for the exchange of ideas and best practices among Posts and private sector stakeholders. Such collaborative activities help Posts to familiarize themselves with technologies and to deploy them. With these two ideas in mind, Pitney Bowes, a member of PostCom [The US trade association, not the UK regulator. Editor) proposed in early 2008 that the Consultative Committee of the UPU start work on postal revenue protection.
The green light came a few months later, when the UPU Congress passed a resolution calling on Posts, in particular in developing countries, to avail themselves of cost effective revenue protection technologies (C19/2008). The revenue protection working group set up in early 2009 gathers a good mix of Posts from all regions, Restricted unions (representing all the Posts of Africa and the Caribbean), and the largest global suppliers of postal equipment and solutions.
Starting from scratch, the group first engaged “internal champions” in the complex UPU structure. We started with the Postal Security Group led by the Chief Postal Inspector of the USPS, Bill Gilligan, whom I thank for his support. The next step was to understand what Posts, globally and in each region, were expecting from us.
More than 80 of the 115 Posts surveyed told us they were experiencing difficulties in collecting revenue owed to them. This directly results from an avowed inability to properly identify and measure leakage, or to put in place the right processes or technologies.
Bulk mail/permit mail entry and invoicing is still a major pain point across the board – from North America to Africa to Europe. [It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that under-payment will be a universal problem if you can weigh your own mail and decide what you owe. How one deals with that “universal truth” is solvable in many different ways, from labor intensive physical checks to the use of sophisticated technologies, the choice often being dictated by the state of development of the Post. Editor]
What can a UPU working group realistically do? Regional workshops, thematic webinars or online training programs go to great lengths to bridge the awareness gap – telling the least developed countries how to start with simple “health checks”, or emerging countries (for instance) the value of data-rich digital metering technologies. Pilots or model projects help Posts understand the concrete steps they need to take, and select the right business model. Many Posts are also willing to consider the development of common regional specifications for their revenue protection solutions.
As working group member DigitalEurope (formerly Mailtec) rightly put it, we need to take one step at a time. In 2010, we will strive to test a series of activities (to be outlined in our forthcoming White Paper on Revenue Protection) so we determine what works best. After all,the UPU’s largest and most successful collaborative activities of today – the Telematics cooperative, and the Direct Mail Advisory Board… started small and grew over time, didn’t they ?
Jean-Philippe Ducasse
