Regardless of it being the summer time, Canada Post has been moving forward on their postal transformation and the building of the Modern Post and therefore July has been a busy month for the Modern Post.

The Ford Transit Connect tested in Ottawa

Canada Post is going forward with their plans to motorize the majority of carriers and therefore they have been testing different vehicles. The idea of testing different vehicles is to develop a list of specifications they want in a new fleet of vehicles. Their latest test was on a Ford Transit Connect which was tested in Ottawa. It will be the first commercial grade “SUV” size vehicle to be introduced to the North American market in the fall of 2009 and is currently used in postal administrations in Europe.

Edit book exercise in Winnipeg

The sequencing of mail is highly dependent upon an accurate address database. CPC will be piloting an “Edit Book” exercise in Winnipeg’s Depot D.  In the exercise, carriers will be asked to keep a book at their case and enter into the book any changes to addresses on their walks. On a regular basis, Supervisors will then update the system to reflect these changes. The project will start this month.

Delivery sub group meetings started

Three preliminary meetings have been held to examine delivery concepts within the depot, on delivery and end of day activities. Canada Post states that they want to have the new values in place by October. We have told them that we believe that this is too fast to do a proper assessment to achieve the correct values.

Collation machines

Canada Post is currently looking for a supplier to automate the sorting and distribution of unaddressed admail. They state that they still are not sure if collation will be done manually or by machines so they want to do a test. This will be tested for 6 months in mid 2009.

Parcel and packet sorting equipment

Canada Post is looking for leading edge equipment to replace the existing parcel and packet sorters. These new machines will have inline scaling and cubing capabilities. Every piece of mail that arrives at the plant without a barcode will be bar-coded.

Container prototypes

There are three new containers that Canada Post is proposing and two are being tested on the Multi-Line Optical Character Reader (MLOCR) in the Toronto South Central Letter Processing Plant (SCLPP) and for collections in Ottawa and Toronto.

Health and safety

CPC presented an overview of their situation at CPC – a historic overview of injury statistics (severity and frequency); accident trends; nature of injuries and a 24 year history of Lost Time Disabling Accident Frequency; opportunities for improvement and work going forward. We are still waiting for a response from Canada Post on the documentation we received regarding the increased injury rates for carriers in the U.S. since the introduction of sequencing.

Keep informed

Members should read the bulletins, talk with their stewards and keep informed of what is happening with the Modern Post as it will have an impact on all members that work for Canada Post.