Contingency and Disaster Planning

Just as in life, many events can happen that are not within our control, such as natural disasters (hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, snowstorms, tornadoes) and sudden personnel changes. Regardless of the circumstances, our goal is to ensure continuity of mail delivery to you.  To do that, we have implemented a 4-level defensive strategy to ensure that we minimize service disruption.

Level 4: Operational

At this level, operation continues to run normally with no service degradation.  Everything works according to our normal processing times

Level 3: Partial Outage

At this level, it's likely that some of our operational staff is sick or temporarily understaffed.  This will reduce our processing capacity and will cause service degradation, but impacted locations will still be operational.

Processing time at this level is expected to take longer.  We may also begin to tier our service level by prioritizing request processing based on the following:

  • Certain plans will have higher priority in the processing queue, especially those who have custom service agreements through our Enterprise plans. 
  • Special handling shipping upgrades (UPS/Fedex upgrades, USPS Express Mail, etc) will have higher precedence over normal shipments that are less time sensitive.
  • If any event causes a specific facility to have reduced processing capacity, we will look at sending some of the mail out to our other processing facilities so that mail will get processed sooner. This will normally introduce about a one day delay in processing your mail. We will assess the situation on a daily basis to determine and balance the additional transit time and the probability of restoring our processing capacity back to normal.

Level 2: Full Outage - Single Site

At this level, it means that a single location must be shut down due to the event. For example, if we notice inclement weather conditions that can affect personnel safety, we will make a decision to close the facility. If we get down to this level, we are looking at the following procedure:

  • All measures introduced in Level 3 will be in effect, including request processing prioritization.
  • If outage is expected to last many days, we will attempt to arrange mail to be collected and shipped to our other locations to do the physical scanning of the mail.  This will introduce around 3-5 business days of delay in you receiving your mail because we fully expect events of this nature to impact mail delivery as well.
  • Packages will NOT be shipped, scanned or forwarded to other locations.  Instead, it will stay on-site and wait for at least the site to reopen.  This may introduce 7 days of delay to package induction, possibly more depending on the severity of the event.

Level 1: Full Outage - All Sites

At this level, we are effectively looking at all our locations being shut down either due to mandated government closures or some other severe national/global event. All operations personnel will be sent home.  At this point, our primary procedure is the following:

  • Have mail held for the time being by the couriers.  
  • Ensure that our operations personnel are taken care of and safe.  
  • As each site recovers, should it recover at different times, we will begin to restore operations.
  • Depending on recovery speed, we may also ship mail to other locations for processing should other sites have people going back to work.  
  • All mail and package processing is expected to be delayed by at least 14-30 days in this situation.

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