Informed Expectations Informed Visibility is Sort of Here. You Need SnailWorks More Than Ever
August 16, 2017   Dave Lewis

The Postal Service sent an email out last week “Introducing” Informed Visibility (IV).  Informed Visibility is now in pilot stage, and SnailWorks is participating, getting a sneak peek at the new platform.  The system still has many data issues to resolve – which is why it’s still in pilot – we are getting a better idea of what the new system will – and will not – be.  All of that notwithstanding, the Postal Service has declared victory, and is now rolling out to the entire industry. IV is one of the more challenging projects the Postal Service has taken on.  They are indeed granting visibility into a lot of their processes, but it’s more like looking through a keyhole.  You can see what’s happening, but making sense out of it still requires expert assistance. The Postal Service provides data, not reports.  The Postal Service views a “mailing” very differently than most mailers.  Where in a system like SnailWorks you can select a job or mailing and look at the tracking results for that job, IV views it differently.  The Postal Service groups data by MID or CRID and date.  Scans are identified by their IMb, as are trays and containers.  While it is possible to look up an individual piece of mail, you will generally need to know the relevant eDoc and MID and/or CRID that represents that piece.  Records and scan events are identified by ID numbers you didn’t create and haven’t seen.  And generally the data can only be accessed by your IV BSA.  What’s that?  You don’t have an IV BSA or more likely don’t know who (whom?) it is?  That’s OK – you’ve got SnailWorks. Let’s say you have located your IV BSA (not to be confused with your Postal Gateway BSA) and they know the relevant CRID, MID and eDoc.  Cool.  Now you will be able to see a listing of scans.  You may be able to find your piece, and see a listing of the scans it’s been through.  There may even be a logical event, a LDE that estimates the day it was delivered.  Viewing all of the pieces in the mailing with some kind of navigable reports still isn’t there – and sharing with your clients is difficult if not impossible. The same goes on for tray and container scans – it’s raw data that is just not very user friendly. We don’t say all of this as a criticism of IV – it’s a great system for providing valuable data.  It’s not really designed to be a reporting system – although some Postal sales people oversell it a bit.  We want to set realistic expectations – Informed Visibility does not replace SnailWorks – it makes SnailWorks even more valuable. In the coming weeks you will see SnailWorks rolling out new features that enhance your visibility of your mail.  Among them:

• Container and tray tracking reports, particularly valuable for our larger mailers managing logistics.
• Links from single piece views to associated trays and containers.
• Enhanced flats tracking through bundle tracking.
• Time of day reporting – what time a mail piece may have been delivered.

There may be more features, too, but we are evaluating the accuracy and completeness of the data before incorporating it into our systems.  The core data seems to be OK – these are the piece scans that have driven our services for years.  Count on the reports you have come to rely on remaining solid.  But other new scans such as bundle scans and logical events remain, to us, unproven.  As the data quality improves we’ll look at incorporating it into our reports. All in all, we are excited about the possibilities Informed Visibility provides, but the Postal Service has a tendency to get overexcited about these enhanced products.  It is still raw data.  You still need a service – more than ever – like SnailWorks to make it useful.  The best analogy we can think of is that USPS has upgraded their Toyota level tracking system to, well, to a somewhat better Toyota, but it is still delivered as a box of Toyota parts you need to assemble yourself (apologies to Toyota.)

Home