Telling a Story with Almost English
August 24, 2018   Dave Lewis

SnailWorks’ Visibility+™ adds new operation descriptions The building blocks of Informed Visibility are scan events.  When something happens to a piece of mail, or the container it is in, this creates a scan event.  Every scan event has an event code (or Operation Code (OpCode)), an equipment description, a process description, and a mail phase, along with a lot of other descriptive fields, critical entry times, and the like.  Here’s one of our favorites: “918 – DBCS/DIOSS BCS DPS,1^ST PASS, Phase 3c – Destination Sequenced Carrier Sortation – Sequenced distribution of carrier route mail for local delivery units, firm, box sections, and other local destinations.”   Kind of a mouthful. When you drill down in Visibility+ to the scan history for a single piece, you will see each scan event listed, and having a good description makes the data a lot easier to understand.  So we kind of sum up the 918 event as:  “Sequenced for Delivery – 1^st Pass”.  So when you look at single piece data in Visibility+ now, you’ll see our translated descriptions.  We think it’s a better view for most folks. Mailing nerds, despair not! (I count myself among you) We still include the event code and you can mouse over it for the official Mail Phase terminology.  And if you want the full unabridged definition, you can visit https://postalpro.usps.com/informedvisibility/OperationCodesList . As the Postal Service continues to add event codes and we find better ways to describe things, expect these terms to evolve. Happy tracking!

Home