The platform sends quality data to postal operators, helping them to improve their services or plan for and manage periods of peak volumes. The performance centre focuses on:
- Monitoring quality of service
- Supporting operational improvements
- Issuing reports
- Performing operational surveys
Monitoring quality of service
The Performance Centre monitors daily international mail movements using IPC CAPE Vision system. Monitoring ensures that short-term problems are identified and fixed before they affect long-term postal performance. The Centre supports postal operators to identify and address any irregularities or quality issues that may appear in daily international operations.
Supporting operational improvement
The Centre also manages the IPC Sprinter Network, the IPC Tray Pool, and the IPC Bag Pool.
The IPC Performance Centre helps improve postal operators processes by following up on their yearly action plans or their progress in implementing IPC solutions such as the IPC Bag Pool, IPC Tray Pool, Future of Mail by Air, Mail Registration Device, etc.
Issuing reports and alerts
The Performance Centre sends out regular reports, such as weekly inbound scanning performance reports, UNEX ranking reports and mis-routing reports as well as monthly key performance indicators.
The Performance Centre also issues exceptional event reports to members as needed, which are kept on an event log, accessible on this page to logged-in members. Exceptional events include bad weather conditions, industrial actions, substantial rise in mail volumes for Christmas and the New Year, which can significantly affect postal operations’ plans, or airline summer and winter schedule changes, which affect routing and timing of mail transport.
The Centre sends out top-level operations managers monthly Performance Alerts and, where applicable, IPC Certification Alerts with key performance indicators. Performance Alerts are used to highlight the operational performance, enabling members to take remedial actions, while Certification Alerts also include the postal operator’s in-house performance and their inbound and outbound performance over the previous six months. The certification alerts are sent before the certification of excellence assessments, as well as after certification, to highlight any identified shortcomings.
Performing operational surveys
The IPC Performance centre is also active in performing operational surveys in offices of exchanges in order to help postal operators to upgrade international letter service. IPC has performed operational surveys with all IPC members and offers this service to non members as well.
The on-site surveys focus on those operational aspects responsible for performance level decline, as identified in the monthly IPC Performance Alerts. The survey team also reviews how well the office of exchange interfaces with the domestic network as well as with the airport ground handlers and international transport.
The surveys then propose a list of recommendations and proposals to improve day-to-day operational procedures for accepting, preparing, processing and handling outbound and inbound priority letter mails.
IPC also performs other types of surveys, such as inbound handling surveys, on site airport transit surveys, or IPC Tray or Bag surveys.