Overview

From being picked up at a mailbox to being delivered at your door, letters and parcels are processed through a variety of physical and digital systems. Items sent through the United States Postal Service (USPS) coming into or out of the West Coast have a high chance of being processed at the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) International Service Center (ISC).

The LAX ISC follows the organizing principle of maximizing the number of mail pieces processed while minimizing costs to USPS and its partners. The facility is located next to the LAX tarmac, accessible to mail offloaded from airplanes on the tarmac and to interstate highways 405 and 105. It houses millions of dollars of machinery, hundreds of employees and can process hundreds of thousands of items daily. As such, the LAX ISC organizing system seeks to input, process and output resources as quickly as possible: the selection of resources is simple (anything that arrives), maintenance is to be achieved through efficient faceted classification, and the ultimate goal is the removal of the resources from the system.

What resources are being used?

The principle resources in the LAX ISC organizing system are mail pieces. These physical resources also possess associated digital resource descriptions that support the critical interactions available to users. These resources may originate inside the United States and have already been classified and entered into the organizing system at post offices and mail processing centers around the country. Alternatively, they may be inbound from postal operations around the world; the LAX ISC would likely receive digital resource descriptions from foreign postal associations prior to receiving the physical resources themselves.

Why are the resources organized?

Within the LAX ISC, USPS-wide organizing system principles must be maintained to facilitate effective communications between the ISC’s physical organizing systems (such as loading items onto a truck destined for another processing center) and digital organizing systems (integration with enterprise databases for customer tracking). Additionally, the ISC must implement internal organizing principles to manage the physical resources (and their digital resource descriptions) within the facility itself.

How much are the resources organized?

The granularity of resource description varies by resource type. Items arrive with existing physical (written address) and digital (such as mail classification as Express or Priority) resource descriptions keep those classifications. A large package that was sent as “Registered Mail” will have more physical and digital descriptions and supported interactions than a postcard, which may only be classified within a collection of other postcards from that location. These classifications are faceted- an item can be organized based on both being classified as First Class and as having a destination of Seoul, South Korea.

Resources must be entered into the facility based on their origin- inbound items arriving from the airport tarmac or outbound items arriving from trucks off of the highway. This requires an orientation of the mail processing flow that allows for items to be directed from airport to highway and highway to airport with staging and loading areas at both ends. While a different physical layout that allowed truck access to the same side of the building as the tarmac could avoid some of the redundant staging areas, it would also increase the risk of resources being incorrectly classified. The physical layout is heavily structured based on the organizing principles enforced by the enormous mail processing machinery; as new equipment has been developed new classifications have been designed and new interactions have been supported within the ISC (such as the implementation of handheld US Customs scanning of parcels). Through this layout of both physical resources and resource descriptions (paper placards on a trolley containing packages) and purely digital descriptions (the parcel ID numbers) different users can perform two keys sets of interactions:

• Find/Navigate: LAX ISC employees are familiar with not only the institutional categories (express mail is put in this corner, registered mail goes into this room) but also the individual categories their coworkers use (Bob on the night shift tends to forget some bags of letters in this corner)
• Identify/Select: The resource descriptions are updated throughout their time in the LAX ISC via automatic and manual scanning of barcodes and RFID tags, allowing both USPS employees and customers to track their mail pieces

When are the resources organized?

Resources enter the overall USPS organizing system domain when they are inducted at the originating USPS facility (such as giving a package to a teller at a post office).

The scope of the LAX ISC itself includes the latent resource descriptions of any items that physically arrive at the facility, where they are reorganized upon receipt. However, there may be discrepancies between the receipt of a physical resource and the digital resource descriptions associated with it. For instance, a plane may unload parcels to a holding area on the tarmac maintained by USPS; however, the USPS staff may not digitally process the barcodes (and thus update the USPS-wide resource descriptions of these items) until much later. Within the facility, resources are organized continuously- they are classified and reclassified as they move between sorting machines and into different holding areas prior to being removed from the facility en route to their final destination.

Who does the organizing?

As noted, USPS-level organization events occur external to the LAX ISC but are supported by ISC interactions. Within the ISC, a variety of stakeholders impact the organizing of the resources:

• USPS partners such as airlines which update digital resource descriptions and physically deliver mail pieces to the facility
• LAX ISC employees who scan, sort and load onto machines all of the resources entering the facility
• Other government agencies like the US Department of Homeland Security who may wish to inspect the resources.

Other considerations

Mail processing as a domain is a unique organizing system in that it exists to physically move resources between two points. The LAX International Service Center is a large-scale manifestation of the challenges that face these types of organizing systems.