USDANEWS VOLUME 56 NO. 5 - MAY 1997

3 Words That Mean "Savings"
Crossword Puzzle Time: What's a three-word phrase that stands for a unique form of savings increasingly found in USDA field service centers around the country?

The answer is "Mail Management Initiative."

Okay, okay, that's much too long to fit in the crossword puzzle in the Des Moines Register newspaper. But the initiative can be found in all USDA Service Centers in Iowa--and in a growing number of other USDA field locations nationwide.

"As part of our consolidation efforts to create 'one-stop shopping' field service centers in Iowa," said Deb Trowbridge, contract program manager for the Farm Service Agency in Iowa, "we wanted to stress better mail management." So state office staffers from FSA, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, and Rural Development in Des Moines, Iowa got together and worked out a plan for FSA to contract with the mail machine vendor Pitney Bowes. The purpose was to establish one commercial postage meter account which would 'service' all the Service Centers in the state.

She said that each USDA Service Center in the state is provided one--and only one--postage meter to service the entire office in that county. Each postage meter has an internal computerized postage accounting system which allows each agency to determine its own expenditures for mail.

Trowbridge said each county office prints out a monthly report, directly off the postage meter, and sends a copy to the respective state office for each USDA agency collocated in that Service Center. Each state office then uses the reports to monitor its own statewide expenditures for mail.

"As part of our encouragement for this mail management initiative statewide," affirmed Doug Betz, chief administrative officer for RD in Des Moines, "FSA leased 124 postage meters at an annual cost of about $475 per meter--for a total annual cost of about $58,900."

"If, instead, the agencies had renewed their own individual leases--thereby keeping multiple postage meters in USDA county offices throughout Iowa--we would have needed 243 meters--at a cost of $115,415."

"Do the math yourself," Betz said. "You'll see that this has meant a savings to USDA of about $56,515 per year."

Trowbridge emphasized that each agency pays its prorated share of the leasing cost directly to Pitney Bowes.

Joan Miller, a branch chief with FSA's Management Services Division at the agency's headquarters in Washington, DC, said that, based on a governmentwide National Performance Review recommendation focusing on mail management, FSA has been encouraging all the Service Centers across the country to adopt mail management initiatives.

"To my knowledge," Trowbridge said, "we in Iowa were the first in USDA to implement this mail management initiative."

June Bryan, USDA's Mail Manager with the Office of Operations in Washington, DC, was part of a team which recently visited the FSA state office in Des Moines, plus the USDA Service Center in Jasper County, Iowa--a prototype practitioner of this mail management initiative.

"Quote me on this," she said. "We found their initiative to be a model program, worthy of emulation Departmentwide." ¤

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