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February 02, 2009 Boosting Efficiency at Centrelink
BRIEF:
Outsourcing its mailroom requirements to Decipha has proven beneficial for Centrelink in South Australia.
DETAILS:
The Centrelink office in South Australia has a steady stream of incoming and outgoing mail. So when an Australia Post account manager suggested a mailroom and courier solution, the agency's finance and services team was keen to find out more.
“We have a lot of mail arriving at and leaving our network of metropolitan and regional Centrelink offices each day and we were open to improving the way this process was managed,” says Craig Atkinson, Contracts Officer, Finance and Services, Centrelink.
Australia Post looked closely at all of Centrelink's mailroom and courier requirements to develop a packaged offering that would meet its needs and provide additional business benefits.
The solution developed for Centrelink, and implemented in July last year, includes the use of Australia Post's specialist mail management business Decipha and national courier company Messenger Post Couriers. It also provides access to Australia Post's presort postage discounts, which have helped the business reduce its postage costs.
Each working day, Decipha's Adelaide office receives all of Centrelink's incoming mail directly from the GPO, along with bags of internal mail from the network of Centrelink offices throughout the state - a total of around 2,200 mail items per day.
Decipha sorts the mail into a number of pre-arranged segments for various Centrelink departments and also sorts mail destined for other Centrelink offices and government agencies.
Messenger Post Couriers is then used to transport the incoming mail to 16 metropolitan and 13 country Centrelink locations. The courier service, which is undertaken by uniformed and security cleared professionals, also transports archive boxes of customer files to Centrelink's records management unit. Mail to Centrelink's interstate offices is transported via Australian air Express (an Australia Post joint-venture company).
According to Craig, the sorting and delivery of incoming mail undertaken by Decipha provides a faster turnaround than if it was carried out by Centrelink staff. “by outsourcing these activities we are able to divert resources and space to other functions.”
Implementing the mailroom and courier services took just under a month and was “first class”, according to Craig. A change manager from Decipha was appointed to work with Centrelink and helped it work through the process smoothly.
Having one Australia Post point of contact for all of Centrelink's mailroom, courier and delivery requirements has also proven beneficial. “We can contact our account manager about anything to do with Australia Post or its associated businesses,” says Craig.
FILE:
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