By Sylvian Bacon
Editor and Leader of Accenture's Global Postal Practice

Welcome to the first volume of Pushing the Envelope: Achieving High Performance in a Competitive Postal Environment. This edition provides postal leaders with a single resource where they can find toplevel thinking, new solutions, and the latest trends to cope with today’s business challenges.

The changes occurring in the postal industry today are monumental. As we undertook this effort and initiated detailed conversations with postal executives around the world, they all described similar challenges. Whether grappling with declining mail volumes or redefining their business models in an era of deregulation, posts seeking to outperform the competition understand that they must define and execute bold strategies if they are to survive and thrive. Our first chapter is dedicated to describing the postal business environment and the challenges that posts are under to compete and achieve high performance in this difficult setting.

Our conversations with postal executives also told of significant successes. Visionary postal executives are transforming their organizations and this first volume of Pushing the Envelopeis designed to tell their story, in their own words. With case studies from posts around the world, Pushing the Envelope highlights innovative solutions that are producing real results. In addition to case studies, this edition incorporates thought-leading white papers drawn from industry and subject matter experts.

The bulk of Pushing the Envelope focuses on these success stories and we have sought to include topics broad enough to be of interest to any executive within your organization. From building a high performance workforce to optimizing the postal supply chain – whether interested in creating stronger customer loyalty, focusing finance operations on performance, or simply understanding what innovative products or services your competitors have launched – Pushing the Envelope contains content that we believe will be of interest to you. This publication is also accompanied with an interactive Web site, www.postalproject.com, which allows you to search for content, contact authors, or order reprints of articles of interest.

I am confident you will find this collection of articles engaging and thought provoking. On behalf of the Accenture global postal practice, I wish you continued success in pushing the envelope at your own organizations. May this volume serve as a guide for your efforts toward high performance.

Sylvain Bacon
Accenture Global Postal Practice
postalproject@accenture.com

Read the Keynote Address by Sylvain Bacon and Michael S. Coughlin: Achieving High Performance in A Competitive Postal Environment

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SYLVAIN BACON leads Accenture’s global postal practice. He is also client partner at USPS where Accenture is the preferred portfolio partner in mail operations, sales and marketing, finance, and human resources. Prior to his USPS assignment in 1994, he spent three years assisting Canada Post. He specializes in supply chain management, customer relationship management, and enterprise resource planning transformation.