The Postal Service has a new system to help efficiently certify and retire equipment and other capital assets that are no longer needed.
Solution for Enterprise Asset Management, also known as SEAM, is an online application used for inventory tracking and other purposes. The system has information on more than 137,000 capital assets in the postal network.
“The goal is to improve efficiency by reducing cycle time from extracting data to completion of the certification,” said Sean Dean, an inventory control specialist at the USPS Asset Accountability Service Center in Windsor, CT.
Dean led the team that developed SEAM. Its members included employees from several other departments and divisions, including other asset accountability service centers; the San Mateo, CA, Accounting Service Center; the process improvements and analytics team in Topeka, KS; Information Technology; and Corporate Accounting.
“Not only were we able to improve the certification process, but we were also able to create automated workflows in SEAM that replaced the manual submission and data entry forms for disposals and transfers,” Dean said.
The Postal Service’s material accountability officers now have the ability to update descriptions of assets and initiate disposals and transfers right from their computers.
Gloria Edwards, a Norfolk, VA, mail processing clerk, recently used the system to submit a disposal request of an old Toyota forklift.
“I couldn’t believe how fast and easy it was,” she said. “In the past it could have taken up to a week for our capital assets to be retired, but now [processing the request] was done in less than an hour and I didn’t have to scan, fax or mail any paperwork.”
The Asset Accountability Blue page has more information.
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