RAF Lakenheath post office scanning for success

  • Published
  • By Senior Master Sgt. Kirk Baldwin
  • 48th Communication Squadron
ROYAL AIR FORCE LAKENHEATH, England --  The RAF Lakenheath Post Office is leading from the front to provide better customer service to the community. You may have noticed over the past few months that there is a whole lot of scanning going on over here. Now that we have the technology in hand, it is time to make it work for you.

Every evening a truck arrives at Lakenheath with thousands of packages. Our clerks work diligently through the night to ensure all parcels are prepared for delivery prior to 2 a.m. One of the steps to achieve this is to scan in all mailings that have bar-coded special services. These parcels account for a good 70 percent of the packages received. Once the arrival scan is complete, the data is uploaded to the United States Postal Service.

By 8 a.m. the next morning, USPS servers have uploaded the most current info, and if you have the tracking number (most companies supply this if they are using the system), you can go to USPS.com, track and confirm, to find out if you have a parcel. Another nifty aspect of the USPS site is that you can request an e-mail notification of when your parcel status has been updated. This way, you only need to visit the site upon initial mailing and input your contact data. Every time your package is scanned during its journey, an e-mail will be sent to you updating its status. Most importantly, once we receive it here at Lakenheath you will get a message letting you know that it has arrived. At that point, you need only retrieve your notification slip and come to our parcel pick-up window. The parcel slips are still required as the USPS message does not include the storage location of your parcel here.

Some problems will be apparent, as is the case with all new systems. For instance, only about 75 percent of the barcodes are readable when they arrive here. Many are damaged by condensation or during shipment, and some are just printed with poor quality ink making them unreadable. USPS is working to ensure quality of mailing labels, so the hope is that the percentage of readable barcodes will increase in the future.

Lakenheath has scanned the arrival and delivery of more than 117, 000 parcels since September 2008. Our numbers are the highest for any Air Force location, and we are dedicated to making this system work for you!