2. Introduction
The United States Postal Service (Postal Service) is required to establish modern service standards for its market-dominant mail products and to design these standards to provide a system of objective performance measurements for each market-dominant product as a basis for measurement of Postal Service performance. These standards should be designed to provide a system of objective external performance measurement unless an internal measurement system is implemented with the approval of the Postal Regulatory Commission (Commission).

After consultations with the Commission and as a result of Postal Regulatory Commission Docket No. PI2008-1, the Postal Service established a variety of external, internal and hybrid systems for market-dominant product service measurement in 2008. Moving forward, the Postal Service anticipates implementing changes in the application of mailpiece and operational scanning technology. These changes are expected to allow for the efficient generation of data that will allow the Postal Service to convert some existing service performance measurement (SPM) systems and components of hybrid systems from external to internal. Accordingly, as described in greater detail below, the Postal Service intends to rely more heavily in the future on internal systems for SPM and to utilize external measurement techniques only for international mail, some special services and mail outside the contiguous 48 states.

This document summarizes the current state of service performance measurement and the proposed future state detailing how the Postal Service will measure service performance relying more heavily on internal measurement systems. The Postal Service expects the proposed measurement system to be as reliable as the current state systems. In addition, the proposed measurement system changes will increase the number of pieces in measurement – moving from a seed/sample system to more of a census-measurement system.

The Postal Service intends for its service performance measurement systems to generate data sufficiently accurate and reliable for purposes of assessing the quality of mail service. These data are expected to provide the Commission with the ability to perform its responsibilities with a high degree of confidence and to reasonably inform the public regarding the quality of service provided to market-dominant products.

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