specialreport
BY MARK B. SOLOMON, SENIOR EDITOR
Going
postal
(in a good way)
Online retailer OWC knew it
could get more bang for its parcel buck
by making heavier use of the USPS.
The trick was finding a way to do it.
THE EMBATTLED U.S. POSTAL SERVICE (USPS) MAY NOT HAVE A LOT OF
folks in its corner right now. But you can put Ryan O’Connor firmly in the flag-waver camp.
O’Connor is the warehouse and logistics manager of Other World Computing
(OWC), a Woodstock, Ill.-based firm that makes computer hardware and is an online
retailer for Apple Inc.’s line of computers and mobile devices. Privately held OWC
generates between $75 million and $100 million in annual revenue.
In his role as keeper of OWC’s fulfillment, distribution, and shipping flame,
O’Connor has always wanted to do more business with the Postal Service. This was
especially true on the international front, where USPS’s relatively low-cost shipping
options—in particular, the “Priority Mail” international flat-rate service introduced
in the spring of 2009—seemed tailor-made for OWC’s line of largely inexpensive
merchandise, much of which couldn’t be shipped overseas cost-effectively with
FedEx or UPS.
But by the start of 2010, O’Connor was consumed with other issues, namely the
inability of OWC’s existing manifest system to keep pace with the retailer’s postal volumes. Each day, OWC reconciled a manifest of more than 100 pages prior to USPS’s
pickup of the shipments at the company’s warehouse in Woodstock, about two hours
northwest of Chicago. Any discrepancy between shipment and manifest, such as a
