The Heat Is On
By Ivan D. Butts
NAPS National President
Happy New Year, my NAPS brothers and sisters. I hope you have a wonderfully blessed, merry Christmas and a joyous New Year. I want to take some time to discuss a new collaboration between Dr. Joshua Colin, chief Retail and Delivery officer and executive vice president, and Isaac Cronkhite, chief Logistics and Processing Operations officer and executive vice president. The process is called the CRDO/CLPO IOP Scorecard.
As part of peak season preparations, Colin and Cronkhite met with their leadership teams. The goal is to ensure we deliver for America daily and on time; this peak will be like no other.
The look of this scorecard will be familiar to those who previously worked under Colin. As a Philadelphia District support manager working in the Eastern Area, as well as a former NAPS Eastern Region vice president before being elected to serve you as a resident officer, I had the opportunity to meet quarterly with then-USPS Eastern Area Vice President Colin and his team.
The “Heat Map” was the tool that provided transparency into operations daily. Using the consistently collected data, a spreadsheet was created that documented processing successes and failures, which were visualized with red, yellow and green indicators. Thus, the name, Heat Map.
This latest scorecard could be considered the Heat Map on steroids. The process takes all operational data between Logistics/Plant and Delivery operations and establishes goal parameters for achievement. On Tuesday, Nov. 23, 2021, the daily report from Headquarters Retail and Post Office Operations began to be delivered to the field. The Heat Map enables Retail and Delivery and Logistics and Processing executives to address opportunities in the integrated operating plan performance that may help operations better serve America.
The daily report includes the following information:
Region, Division, P&DC, Area, District Summary
I acknowledge that the USPS is a much different agency now than when Colin catapulted the Eastern Area to consistently be number one or two in the USPS year after year. We face diminished resources in processing equipment with the wholesale dismantling of equipment.
We continue to be handcuffed with poor employee availability driven by a liberal leave policy, EFEL leave, COVID leave and employee retention. We have more EAS employees than ever before actually carrying mail daily. We have received reports of managers working seven days a week for weeks, delivering mail every day.
We still have thousands of vacant EAS jobs that are slow to be filled due to many reasons—too many to address in this column. The lack of resources needed to move this process to the success that could be achieved will present a challenge for managers in charge of the day-to-day operations of America’s Postal Service.
There is one, almost undisputed point here. When operations are looked at with this level of transparency and detail, as we have seen the Heat Map do in the past, performance can reach heights of sustainability that help the USPS be rated one of the top federal agencies years after year.
In solidarity…
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