As someone with sloppy handwriting from lack of use and one who
handwrites all my envelopes, I found this article quite informative.
Even when it turns to humans, the process is still high tech.  If only
they could be as efficient in Chicago as they are in the rest of the
country.

Kelly



The Wall Street Journal

December 20, 2002

Post Office Turns to Humans When High-Tech Gear Fails

'To: Sante Klaz,
North Poll' Can Stump Sorter Machines

By RICK BROOKS

Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

TAMPA, Fla. -- In case Santa Claus is wondering, postal worker Dana
Cowgill has been a very good girl this year. Working at least eight hours
a day, with only two days off in the past two weeks, she has rescued
Christmas cards and other mail that was seemingly doomed by sloppy
handwriting, missing ZIP Codes and addresses that didn't exist.

Ms. Cowgill is one of the human beings who takes over when an envelope
stumps the U.S. Postal Service's automated sorting system with its
sophisticated handwriting-recognition technology. The combination of
high-powered machinery and old-fashioned gumshoe work here at one of the
post office's 20 centers for hard-to-read mail is part of an effort by
the world's largest mail carrier to improve the efficiency of its
sprawling distribution system.

Speeding mail delivery is crucial as the post office tries to slow the
erosion of its first-class business because of online bill payment and an
invasion of mail-related businesses by rivals, including United Parcel
Service Inc. and four major European post offices.

Last Monday, the busiest day of the year, when more than triple the usual
number of letters passed through post offices across the country, Ms.
Cowgill deciphered addresses on 9,389 envelopes, zeroing in on enough
information, like a bad ZIP Code, to tell a computer how to steer the
mail to the right destination. And the 29-year-old postal worker did it
all sitting at a computer screen, without having to touch a single
letter.

Nowadays, the addresses on more than 85% of all first-class letters can
be read by the scanners built into mail-processing machines, a big
improvement over older sorting equipment that required employees to enter
delivery codes manually. Constant tweaking of handwriting-recognition
software is boosting the recognition rate by about two percentage points
a year. The Postal Service has now automated the handling of first-class
mail to the point where letters can be given to carriers in the exact
order of the delivery stops along their routes.

[photo] At a remote encoding center in Tampa, Fla., postal employees
decipher and manually input address information that the computerized
system couldn't recognize.

The result: Contrary to popular perception, the Postal Service is getting
more efficient, moving 12% more mail and delivering to 12 million more
addresses with the same number of workers it had seven years ago.
Meanwhile, delivery of the average first-class item took 1.88 days in a
16-week period ended Sept. 6, compared with 1.94 days a year earlier.

Postal processing and distribution of the 88 million letters postmarked
each day is handled at 250 plants around the country. When a truckload of
mail arrives at one, it is piled into hampers and then dumped onto a
series of conveyor belts that feed into sorting machines. Operating at a
rate of 40,000 pieces an hour, the machines face all the envelopes in the
same direction and cancel their stamps. They also snap an electronic
image of the front of every envelope and spray a unique code in
fluorescent orange on the back. Then the mail sits in a tray while the
image of each envelope is scanned and a sophisticated
handwriting-recognition program checks the address against a graphic
database.

In cases where no match is found, the image is zapped via a high-speed T1
line to a remote-encoding center like the one in Tampa, which handles
hard-to-read mail from roughly 400 post offices in the Southeast. The
Tampa operation typically receives about one million black-and-white
images a day from plants scattered from suburban Atlanta to south
Florida.

To decipher addresses, workers often take a quick look at the ZIP Code
first, to make sure it matches the city in the address. Foreign addresses
can be a problem because letter writers are confused about where to put
postal codes and country names. Smudged ink, slanting lines and the
opaque windows on some bill envelopes can also confuse scanners.

Workers have a particularly tough job during the holiday season. Red and
green envelopes frequently trip up the picture-taking. So do brightly
colored ink and extra scribblings of "Ho, Ho, Ho!" Worst of all, the vast
majority of Christmas envelopes are handwritten, and some senders'
chicken scratches are simply illegible. Letters to Santa at the North
Pole typically get a code that bounces them back to local post masters.
"There's only so much you can do," says Lee Davis, who has worked at the
Tampa facility for about a year.

Still, out of 2.3 million letter images that came and went on Monday,
postal workers found clues that helped 1.9 million letters get back on
track in time for Christmas, spending an average of 4.7 seconds on each
item.

Once workers complete their sleuthing work, all the envelopes are fed
through additional feeding and sorting equipment. The machines read the
orange ID tag on each envelope, ask the computer for any additional
information generated by the remote-encoding center and then print a
black bar code on the front of the envelope. That code contains all the
delivery information required, and the letter is now ready for the
journey to its final destination. Addresses that couldn't be deciphered
are flagged by the bar-coding equipment and diverted to a reject bin for
manual processing.

Following their success with letters, postal officials are working on
plans to overhaul the processing of magazines and catalogs. The project
could help the Postal Service cut its expenses by as much as $2.8 billion
a year, or about 4%, mostly by shrinking the amount of time it takes to
deliver the mail by 20%.

Meanwhile, the workers in Tampa have some tips for customers who are
sending out cards. "I always make sure I write correctly," says Ms.
Cowgill. She adds that she mailed her 35 cards about 10 days ago. "Send
early," she says. "That's our motto."

Write to Rick Brooks at
[log in to unmask]

Updated December 20, 2002


VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
 VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html