On June 30, China Post successfully concluded the first phase of its special campaign for timeliness optimization and improvement. The service standards on 9699 key EMS routes across the whole postal network in four major categories all benchmarked against those of the competitors, with all these routes reaching the standards. Provincial postal branches in 31 provinces (autonomous regions, municipalities) all met the standards, with four core indicators showing outstanding performance.

Since the campaign for timeliness optimization and improvement was launched in January this year, China Post Group has set mandatory targets of “aligning service standards on 9,699 key EMS routes with those of competitors and hitting all benchmarks”. It has broken down the targets by each provincial postal branch, EMS route and operational process, and planned to advance the upgrading of the timeliness capabilities of the whole network in three phases. The first phase focused on the four categories of key EMS routes including those to 51 major cities and those for intra-provincial mailing, strategic clients and volume-sufficient markets.

Provincial postal branches across the country focused on addressing the weaknesses throughout the entire process of mail acceptance, processing, transportation and delivery, and mobilized all front-line staff to tackle key issues in a targeted manner. In the process of acceptance, they took regular measures to reduce over-sized and overweight items and to enable dynamic clearance of items held up for six hours. At the processing stage, they made special efforts to address mis-sorting, misrouting and shift-backlog issues, reducing the overall overdue rate from 1.02 percent to 0.24 percent and the mis-sorting and misrouting rate from 0.09 percent to 0.05 percent. In the process of transportation, they implemented standardized governance over intra-city postal routes, with the on-time transport rate increasing from 87.1 percent to 100 percent. And China Postal Airlines increased its flight regularity rate to 95.8 percent. In the process of delivery, they deepened work shift management to ensure dynamic zero backlogs exceeding 24 hours. At the same time, China Post optimized the operation plans on a total of 1,271 routes across the postal network, opened 137 direct truck mail routes, increased 105 high-speed rail routes and 314 civil aviation mail routes, and brought the last-mile delivery frequency up to standard. Clearing blockages along the entire chain from route planning to last-mile delivery, it elevated the timeliness on 9,699 key EMS routes to industry-leading service standards.

By the time when the first phase concluded, China Post had achieved all the set goals across the network, and improved the service standards of its parcel, express and logistics business multi-dimensionally. The timeliness on the 9699 EMS routes in the four major categories now matches that of the competitors. And the provincial postal branches in 31 provinces (autonomous regions, municipalities) have fully achieved the service standards. Since the campaign, the compliance rate for inter-provincial outbound items has increased by 10 percentage points, that for inter-provincial inbound items by 12.5 percentage points, and that for intra-provincial items by 15 percentage points, while the proportion of oversized items has dropped by 6.5 percentage points.