August 16, 2023 Notice of Availability of Draft Plan for Flat-Shaped Mail Section 206 of the Postal Service Reform Act of 2022 (PSRA), Public Law 117–108, 206, 136 stat. 1127 (2022), required the Postal Regulatory Commission (Commission), in consultation with the Inspector General of the United States Postal Service, to conduct a Flats Operations Study…
From: Lamont Brooks <lbrooks@apwu.org> Sent: Saturday, May 8, 2021 Subject: Notification No. GCCC20210149 USPS Will Discontinue and Dismantle FSS Machines In Several Facilities Across the Country We have requested several meeting on the Postal Service shift from letter/flat automation equipment to package sorting equipment under the ten-year plan. The problem has been we have been…
August 13, 2018 Nearly a decade since its rollout, the Flats Sequencing System (FSS) — the football-field sized sorting machines for flats mail — is still falling short of expectations. At its inception, stakeholders were optimistic FSS would improve productivity and reduce the U.S. Postal Service’s costs for handling flats mail. But, declines in flats…
By D. Eadward Tree – January 11, 2017 More than seven years after it began rolling out, the billion-dollar system that was supposed to revolutionize how publications and other flat mail are handled is still making the U.S. Postal Service less, not more, efficient. In fact, the Flats Sequencing System’s performance, already well below plan,…
Monday, April 18, 2016 Where the U.S. Postal Service sees an opportunity to expand the Flats Sequencing System to more ZIP codes, mailers see a backdoor rate increase. Postal officials recently told mailing-industry representatives that declining volumes and some equipment upgrades are creating excess capacity for the FSS. At a meeting of the Mailers Technical…
Monday, August 31, 2015 “Mail destinating in FSS zones . . . that had previously qualified for Standard Mail Carrier Route rates migrated to FSS rates in the Standard Mail Flats product,” the USPS explained. Translation: What had been called Standard Flats hasn’t become more efficient; it’s just that the definition of Standard Flats has…
February 9, 2015 From Flats Sequencing to Network Rationalization, many of the U.S. Postal Service’s recent cost-cutting programs have not been living up to the agency’s projections, a multi-industry mailers group says. Worse, the programs have shifted costs to mailers without apparently benefiting USPS, the Association for Postal Commerce (PostCom) wrote in a recent filing…
Law360, New York (September 10, 2014) — A Virginia federal judge has agreed to dismiss a False Claims Act suit accusing Northrop Grumman Systems Corp. of misleading the U.S. Postal Service and failing to meet benchmarks in delivering worth $874 million. U.S. Judge T. S. Ellis III agreed with Northrop’s memorandum that no evidence exists that…
