Foreign Post office

THE STORY OF First Foreign Post office Certification

This photo was taken during the award of first foreign Post Office Certification in India as per IS/ISO 9001 by BIS. Seated next to me on the left is Shri K.Kadirvel, my colleague & co-auditor  and on the right side is Shri Mahesh, then Director of FPO at Chennai. I was then the  Head of Management System Department at Chennai and was the Lead Auditor for this project.

 It was just a phone call  from the Director of the foreign post office that culminated  to this great event at the end. He sought  guidance on the benefits of implementing ISO 9001 in a service organization. Shri Mahesh,  wanted to implement this  system for the first time in the country in his department. Later on Post office as a whole implemented  the  ‘Sevottam certification’.

On the phone, he made two queries to me:

1. What is the benefit of this system to a Public  Service industry ?.

2. Would an a organization like Post Office get any tangible benefits  where Government and international protocols have to be followed mandatorily followed and there is very little scope for modifying  the existing the  process?. 

After listening to him, I asked for a meeting with him and for a short  visit to witness their operations. He readily agreed and I spend some time studying the operations in detail.

The operation is not very complex: When any  person, anywhere in India wants to send  a cover or packet to be delivered to another location in a different country, it can be given at any of the  Post office in India and pay for the stamps. These packets  from each zone is collected to the nearest zonal foreign post office to repack after   sorting. These bags are then moved  to their  assigned Gate way stations. ( Kolkatta, Bombay etc.) From there as per the country sorting, it is again regrouped and transported either by air/sea/rail/road to destined  country.

As per the mutual  Postal agreement  with other countries the packets finally reach the  local post office of the concerned person and gets delivered. All these operations are completed in 15-20 days very efficiently.

During  my observations of operations  on that day, I found two areas of opportunities for improvement.

1. A case of  misrouting detected on an article but delivered within the time  frame. So the customer  did not even know about this mishap. This was a process error which could have been avoided and would have saved lot of time for the consumer.

2. In the other case  the stamp duty calculated for the packet was slightly more than the required amount by the collecting post office. The customer did pay the amount asked by post office and normally overcharging or undercharging is not known to customers. Post office charges are comparatively very less and people in post office are very courteous and customer friendly.  The excess amount was just 10 rupees and this  human  error was  not very serious. But it was a service defect which could be removed.

So I  told him, the implementation would help you to identify service defects and set targets  to improve the efficacy and efficiency of the entire system. After the discussions, on that day itself, he ordered  to return that Rs10/-  to the customer and apply for application for BIS certification.

I realized on that day my marketing skills.  I never knew till that time I can do this specialized task, even though I studied Management (PGDBM).