Toying With Technology at Fla. Postal Plant
'Barney,' 'Big Bird' Robots Prove They Are Not Child's Play

FORT MYERS, Fla.—The men and women who oversee the U.S. Postal Service were as giddy as a group of elementary school students as they stared at the taxicab-yellow robot that workers here call "Big Bird." Its task was simple enough: to sort trays of mail to the airlines that serve this booming, Gulf Coast retirement mecca.

"You don't have to pay it overtime," said a smiling Postmaster General William J. Henderson

"And it doesn't hurt its back," added postal governor LeGree S. Daniels of Harrisburg, Pa., one of nine presidential appointees who oversee the Postal Service.

Big Bird was only one of the three new technological mail systems that brought smiles to postal executives last week as they toured the mail processing plant nestled among the palm trees next to Fort Myers International Airport. There was also "Barney," the large purple mail bins through which all incoming letters are funneled on conveyor belts and, the biggest draw of all, the two-story high, forest green canceling and sorting machines dubbed "Godzilla."

Officially called "an integrated buffer system," the Italian-made Godzilla machines were the post office's star attractions. They took letters by the thousands and canceled them and sorted them into one of more than 200 destinations--all without being touched by a single human worker.

Soaring overhead belts carried a steady stream of the letters through a series of machines, eliminating the backbreaking manual labor jobs that are the mainstay of most mail plants. Godzilla's accuracy was said to be high, as good and as fast as any letter-sorting system ever tested by postal officials.

"I've been in the Postal Service 35 years and I've never seen letters transported like that," said M. Richard Porras, the agency's chief financial officer. "It was unbelievable . . . no human hands."

To understand why such a machine--even one in the early stages of testing--could so excite postal executives, one need look no further than the 33-cent stamp on any letter. Most of that stamp's price--76.5 percent, to be exact--goes toward paying the salaries and benefits of the nation's 848,458 postal workers.

And if the Postal Service is to ever conquer its escalating costs, Henderson and the other postal executives know, they must do something dramatic to reduce that percentage. Their answer has been to invest $5.3 billion in machines that will do the dull, repetitive work that postal workers, like Henderson's late father, a North Carolina postal clerk, have done by hand since the days when Benjamin Franklin was colonial postmaster.

And, as Henderson has acknowledged, the task of trimming costs suddenly has assumed a new urgency. The reason: Electronics--e-mails and faxes--are diverting mail from the post office, eroding what only a few years ago seemed to be the Postal Service's permanent monopoly on the movement of written communications.

Henderson and other senior postal executives have come to the realization that mail--especially the highly profitable first-class letters used to pay bills--are disappearing from their mail stream, never to return. Equally troubling, foreign postal administrations--Britain's Royal Mail and Germany's Post, for example--have invaded the United States, setting up operations designed to bypass Henderson's blue mailboxes and send U.S. letters overseas.

A career postal executive who joined the agency 26 years ago, Henderson turned to the agency's engineering guru last spring, days after he was named postmaster general. His charge to William J. Dowling, the postal vice president in charge of engineering: Find new ways to use technology to cut personnel costs.

A 54-year-old Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate who has overseen projects from machines that read handwritten addresses to the development of self-adhesive stamps, Dowling has transformed the eight-year-old beige mail processing plant on Jetport Loop into his test lab. The results, according to Norbert J. DeMars, the Fort Myers plant manager, have been nothing short of spectacular.

With the two Godzilla integrated buffer systems, the first of which was installed in the fall of 1997, DeMars figures he has had "almost a 50 percent reduction" in the amount of labor needed to process his letter mail. Furthermore, he says the green machine is quicker and more accurate than the old processes because it eliminates any chance of human error by feeding the wrong trays of mail into the wrong machine.

By cutting processing time, DeMars said he is able to dispatch his outgoing mail sooner, allowing out-of-town letters to catch earlier flights and to sort incoming mail earlier than before. He calls the results "phenomenal" and credits the machines with helping him keep up with mail volume that is growing by 10 to 12 percent a year, a rate well in excess of national averages.

Godzilla can be run by one or two workers, well below the half dozen or more that would be needed to keep operational the three older machines it replaces. A major problem with those machines is that they easily jam, halting the entire process at critical times and requiring that thousands of letters be transported manually--pushed and pulled by hand--between each machine. Pushing and pulling trays of mail make most postal plants seem like an industrial shop out of the 1930s, and Dowling wants to change that image.

Dowling and Henderson were encouraged by the test results here. "This is it," said Henderson, who calls the Fort Myers plant the future postal plant.

None of the 300 other mail processing plants--such as those in Capitol Heights, Md., or Merrifield, Va.--have anywhere near as much advanced technology. Henderson's predecessor, Marvin T. Runyon, a former automobile executive, took a phrase from that industry and dubbed Fort Myers the Postal Service's "lights out" plant, meaning the mail could literally be processed in the dark--all by machine.

Thus far, however, Godzilla's purchase price is too high, more than $500,000 apiece. To make the machines practical, Dowling and others say its costs must be much lower.

And Dowling said he must do still more testing to prove that the results here are not an anomaly; that processing plants in large urban cities--where the tensions between postal managers and their unionized workers are much higher than in Fort Myers "in this technology-friendly country"--can achieve the same personnel savings. If proven, the green machines would go into about 250 plants, officials say.

To make the plant truly automated, Dowling said, Fort Myers needs yet another costly feature, a "tray management system" that would allow trays of mail to flow through the plant on a guided pathway, routed by computers and untouched by human hands. As it is now, workers have to physically dump letters into big Barney's bins and then cart off the trays of mail after Godzilla has sorted them.

"Our labor force will transition to a few, roving employees," a video told the touring postal executives.

None of the 725 postal workers here have lost their jobs as a result of the labor savings that DeMars attributes to the machines so far. Indeed, the rapid growth in mail volume here may make staff reductions unlikely even with the most high-tech of machines, postal officials said. At least at this plant, further "savings" would occur because use of the machines will be able to limit the need for additional hires to meet the growing mail volume.

Postal officials have deliberately avoided publicizing the plant, partly to tamp down possible employee fears of layoffs.

"It's not realistic to think we can have a plant this size and no people," DeMars told a visitor.

The Postal Service's labor agreements contain no barrier to the introduction of new machines like Godzilla, Big Bird or Barney. But the agreements do prohibit firing any postal worker after six years of employment, except for cause. Henderson says that means the agency would have to rely on attrition to slim down its ranks, if the new machines can be shown to be cost-effective.

Union leaders have not voiced any public complaints over the automation project.

"I don't get too excited about these things," said Moe Biller, president of the 361,000-member American Postal Workers Union, who visited the plant earlier this month. "As they bring in more automation, they've added more people, but surely the bottom's going to fall out on that."

Postal workers make up the largest civilian work force in the nation, and they enjoy pay and benefits that are among the best in the country. Thanks in part to the aggressive postal unions, the average postal worker makes $36,600 a year and, when benefits are added, the cost per employee jumps to $47,800, a level that Runyon, the former postmaster general, once complained was 20 to 30 percent higher than their civilian counterparts.

Henderson and others are hopeful that postal workers will accept the new technology, whatever form it takes. DeMars likes to brag that his facility was the first in the nation to completely eliminate the large letter-sorting machines that clerks once used to route letters one at a time.

"We're going to look out for the people who work for us," he said, "but their jobs are going to be changing."

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