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Digital postbox6/24/2023 According to a Bloomberg article, his early efforts were slow, such as using fax to deliver letters or hiring postmen to disseminate telegrams. In 1971, the year the first email was sent, the USPS hired former Peace Corps member and financial analyst Gene Johnson to study ‘futuristic mail services’ via the USPS Advanced Services department. Like other forms of communication such as the telegraph system, telephone, mobile devices and email threatened the post’s existence, and postal services needed to adjust to available technology and consumer needs. The letters would be printed on-site and given to the recipients.īut despite the early lead, the postal service began to lag, trapped in a whirlwind of politics, costly failures and speedier alternatives. To avoid clogging up the postal services, family-written letters were scanned to hundreds of feet of microfilm, encased in a capsule, then shipped overseas. For decades, the agency integrated new technologies, shifting to changing environments, underpinning its ability to deliver billions of pieces of mail every year, from the beaches of Miami to the banks of Alaska, for just cents per letter.ĭuring World War II, the US Postal Service copied V-mail from England. Many countries eventually copied it, including the USA in 1897.Īccording to The Week magazine, the US post office experimented with everything from stagecoaches to airplanes, and even pondered sending mail cross-country on a missile. It was an archaic form of digital transformation that benefitted both the customer and the system itself.īack when letters and parcels were being delivered by horses or on foot, in the late 1800s, Scottish engineer William Murdoch developed a pneumatic system using pressurized tubes to deliver letters. Perhaps that’s why people overlooked them. Its innovations integrated themselves into the everyday life of the everyday consumer. But the post office was once transformative in a practical way. These days, when you think of technology, you think of Apple or Tesla or Virgin Galactic. It may not seem like it today, but the postal system has always been a cornerstone of innovation. Many years later, this Danish framework has been adopted by numerous countries worldwide. Its launch was ambitious as it made digital conversion mandatory. Denmark’s Digital Post, which was set up with digital solutions provider e-Boks, is how the government corresponds with citizens 15 years old and up.It also created a digital solution to reach more rural areas, using a sim card-based network. India Post began centralizing services via a single digital platform in 2017.This new post office digitizes old systems, features state-of-the-art technology and offers integrated services, such as financial and payment schemes. Pakistan Post opened itself to franchising its digital post offices in 2020.Packstation, its parcels subsidiary, features automated self-service booths and self-service dispatching. Deutsche Post has digitalized nearly all of its operations.Itella-owned Smartpost facilitates self-service post offices through a delivery point solution.SingPost is an award-winning postal service whose range of features includes an online platform for 24/7 postal access, over 300 self-service kiosks and the digitalization of postal operations.The purpose of a smart post office is to streamline processes to allow employees and customers to focus on the core of business and services.Įxamples of a smart system in the postal industry include: A smart system uses data and artificial intelligence to learn customer behavior, thereby eventually becoming predictive and adaptive. Used in the same way other items and industries are considered ‘smart’ these days, a smart post office integrates modern technology automation, the Internet of Things and real-time tracking with the overall efficiency of service. For the purposes of this analogy and at the rate it is going, the postal industry is more a cassette tape.įor the postal industry to find its place in this century, the solution is simple: be smarter. It’s not a better way to conduct the transfer of information and, unfortunately, more efficient ways are available. However, sending post via the postal service is not akin to listening to music on vinyl. In rural cities as well as developing countries, it continues to serve as a lifeline and source of information and communication. In the US, the Postal Service (USPS) serves as a symbol of democracy. Sentimentality, unfortunately, isn’t enough to sustain the billions of dollars needed to run the industry. Even before the onset of the pandemic, people did not want to go all the way to a post office or even a postbox to send a letter that would take a hundred times longer to reach the recipient than email or text, or a messaging app. The truth is that the postal office the way we know it is close to irrelevance.
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