Automation to bring joy to letter writers
By Jocelyn Uy
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 00:06:00 12/27/2007
Filed Under: People, Culture (general)
MANILA, Philippines—At this time of the year, 24-year-old Cindy Ferrer is drawn to a different kind of holiday rush.
On her desk at home, she carefully scribbles on sweet-scented stationery and doodles on Hallmark cards selected with tender love and care from a bookstore to be sent to friends living miles away via “snail mail.”
Never mind if the greeting cards and letters do not reach their destinations on time. A loving touch is what’s important, Ferrer says.
The appeal of sending mail the traditional way has remained with Ferrer despite the unpleasant reputation of the country’s postal system and the advent of electronic mail and mobile phones that could send messages in the wink of an eye.
“I want to send my friends personalized cards with pictures and my drawings in them and the idea of putting stamps still excites me,” the Nueva Ecija lass says.
But such feeling of delight, familiar in the prewar years, has been lost in this cyber age.
Public trust in the postal system has also deteriorated due to “allegations of corruption, inefficiency, thievery, pilfering and nondelivery (of mails and parcels),” admits Postmaster General Hector Villanueva.
From 5 billion letters sent annually through Philippine Postal Corp. (Philpost) a decade ago, the figure is now down to 290 million.
However, there is a silver lining for Philpost with the implementation of the P5.7-billion automation project next year, which aims to interconnect its roughly 2,500 post offices across the country via the Internet, Villanueva told the Inquirer.
Less thievery
“Public trust and confidence will come with it because it’s all electronic. There will be no more human intervention so there would be less thievery and pilfering,” Villanueva says.
The computerization project is a nine-year contract with the Japanese software firm, Renaissance of Age, which will operate under a build-lease-transfer scheme.
Under the scheme, while the government corporation is spared from shelling out money, the Japanese company will take a 72-percent share in Philpost’s revenue generated by the automation until the contract expires.
Once the project is implemented, Villanueva said that tracking down parcels and even ordinary mail will no longer be likened to a “search for a needle in a haystack.”
At present, letters stockpiled in post offices are transported to and from big cities and far-flung villages without being recorded so the chances of tracking them are almost zilch, he says.
Bar codes
The computerization of the entire postal system will see to it that all packages, including P7 worth of mail, will be bar-coded, allowing the sender to check whether what had been mailed had reached its destination and, if not, where it had fallen through the cracks.
“It would be easier for us to monitor all these incoming letters and identify which letters disappeared, were pilfered, tampered and undelivered,” Villanueva says.
“We can also interconnect right away with our branches in regions if we want to trace or send money orders.”
Currently, Philpost sends money orders through the mail—another factor why senders turn to big-time money remittance firms to do the job.
Villanueva concedes that the post office could only minimize, not totally eliminate, theft. He puts the blame on the lack of deposit-taking outlets in the countryside that could capture dollar remittances of overseas Filipino workers.
Banks intimidate OFWs
He says many OFWs are intimidated by banks because too many requisites are imposed on them upon opening a savings account. Aside from a minimum deposit requirement, pertinent documents and identification cards are demanded from them, he adds.
“But many of our OFWs are not perfectly documented and they don’t want to expose themselves so they take the risk of sending money to their relatives through letters,” Villanueva says.
He says cases of missing letters have decreased but will not be eliminated “as long as OFWs send money through letters.”
“There’s so much money flowing through the mail so the temptation [of theft] is great,” he adds.
However, Philpost expects that once it has rolled out its automation program, it could gradually convert its post offices scattered across the country into deposit-taking branches.
Postal Savings Bank
In 1906, Postal Savings Bank (PSB) was a division of the Philpost—then the Bureau of Post—which allowed it to bring banking services to the countryside.
But 50 years later, its operations deteriorated due to the emergence of the private banking sector and the shift of its clients to the latter because they were offered higher interest on savings deposits.
In 1973, the late strongman Ferdinand Marcos issued a directive barring the establishment of PSB branches in places where banking services were already available.
Villanueva says Marcos stopped the post office from performing such function as it became a threat to commercial banks owned by his cronies.
The PSB was reopened only in July 1994 by then President Fidel V. Ramos as a wholly owned subsidiary of Philpost.
Villanueva notes that currently, there are only 22 PSB branches throughout the country—most of them in cities.
Opening accounts with stamps
“Once we are fully computerized, we could convert our nearly 2,500 post offices into savings bank branches as well as into remittance hubs that could serve also the countryside, which is our strength,” he adds.
Stamps, he says, would be honored again in opening an account, which even schoolchildren and the ordinary housemakers could avail themselves of.
Villanueva is optimistic that the automation project will double the P3.5-billion gross revenue (P2 billion from stamps and P1 billion from money orders) the corporation earns yearly.
“Once we are wired, we will be able to gradually restore the confidence and trust of our people and we can be in the thick of competition for the remittance and money order business,” he says.
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