13 million reasons to love Contract Delivery Service USPS
News Link - March 14, 2007 The Postal Service adds 1.8 million delivery points a year. Servicing those new points in the most fiscally responsible manner is important to our customers and our bottom line.
Contract Delivery Service (CDS) is a contract agreement between the Postal Service and a private individual or firm for the delivery and collection of mail from homes and businesses. CDS and rural routes are similar, but historically, USPS has been able to provide CDS at a lesser cost per delivery, per day.
To help get the most out of CDS, a team from Rural Delivery and Surface Transportation established guidelines to handle new growth. The guidelines call for considering all services - city, rural and CDS - when establishing delivery for new delivery points. The guidance includes cost evaluation tools to help team members arrive at a decision. Establishing new delivery points was moved from the Postmaster level to the District level and a growth management coordinator was identified for each district.
Six training sessions were conducted for contracting and delivery specialists. So how's it working? The percentage of annual growth of new delivery points for CDS increased from 1% to 4%. The total annual cost avoidance by using CDS instead of rural delivery for 58,131 new delivery points in FY 2005 was $3,234,702. The total contract savings for the four-year period is nearly $13 million