PostEurop and the UPU have signed an agreement on a multi-year integrated project to improve the quality of mail exchanges.
Szebeny Botond, Secretary General of PostEurop, and Edouard Dayan, Director General of the Universal Postal Union, took time out from the Postal Operations Council session to sign an agreement on a multi-year integrated project to improve the quality of mail exchanges in the countries of Eastern Europe.
"This project fits neatly with rolling out the UPU’s postal development plan for the Europe and CIS region 2009–2012, bringing together the UPU’s expertise and PostEurop’s regional know-how," said Mr Botond, head of a Restricted Union comprising 48 European Posts.
The joint project, based on PostEurop's own methodology, will lend technical and logistical support to the introduction of modern technologies, quality evaluation systems and tools for improving quality of service.
“We shall be sending our experts to beneficiary countries in South-East Europe and the Balkans to transfer knowledge acquired in Western European countries,” added Mr Botond.
This part of Europe is well covered by quality of service testing, in particular the UPU’s continuous tests. Thanks to a joint UPU-PostEurop initiative, dubbed the European matrix, the number of links tested rose to 136 in 2008. Unfortunately, some of the results remain unsatisfactory (less than 50%), and one of the goals of this regional project will be to achieve 80% compliance with the UPU's J+5 worldwide end-to-end delivery standard for international letter-post items.
This agreement is another milestone in the very close cooperation between the UPU and PostEurop – among other things, the two organizations have worked closely on an inventory of postal sector greenhouse gas emissions. Now they can add the quality of mail exchanges to the list of their joint achievements.