Most everyone already knows all this but here ya go anyway.....What are those SPM's for anyway?
SPM's are sampling requests in the field that ask for us to scan flats and letters. We used to pay IBM about $30 million a year to do the sampling, but a PO brain surgeon decided carriers could do it more cost effectively.
When we get a sampling request, we are being asked to scan (check) what we deliver that day versus PO Informed Delivery, which gives the customer pictures of what's going through the DPS machine daily for delivery to their box. Those scans we provide should match exactly with Informed Delivery the customer gets. That's the audit part we are doing.
To avoid "oversampling" -- which means we scan more mail than the customer gets pictures of -- and therefore we fail the test -- we ONLY sample DPS from that CURRENT day, NOT anything from hot case, misthrows, leftovers etc. Again, that day's DPS ONLY is what we scan. Clerks mark up hot case mail with a yellow slash so we can identify it when out in the field. We created this process because we kept getting errors from district that we were scanning more than Informed Delivery showed.
IF you get a sampling request, you must respond. Sometimes they're on a different street, etc. and it becomes a saved work order that must be pulled up in your scanner when you reach that address and completed. Often the SPM request comes after you've passed the address, or there's no mail to scan, and as long as we indicate that in our response on the scanner, we've done our job. We get on the district bad list if we miss one.
Now's the time for y'all to make additions, corrections, deletions!!