By Lee U-Wen

Long before "productivity" became a buzzword, one well-known local company was already busy thinking out of the box - or in its case, the letterbox - on how best to boost its operational efficiency.

And the man who has been at the heart of Singapore Post's ongoing productivity drive is its executive vice-president (mail) Woo Keng Leong, who has perhaps seen and done it all in his 32 years with the company.

"The environment is always changing due to things like technology, so we want to redesign jobs to not only meet these changing needs but also to improve the productivity of our staff and pass these gains on to them," he said in a recent interview with BT.

He cited the example of the constant surge in the number of e-commerce packages being mailed out each year. In 2009, SingPost handled 2.4 million items a month on average.

Two years later, that figure rose 55 per cent to 3.7 million items.

Last November, SingPost spent $5 million on a new machine to automate the sorting process for packages, allowing the company to sort some 10,000 items an hour.

Previously, the work was done manually - and somewhat painstakingly - by a group of 20 workers who could each sort only about 700 items an hour.

With the multi-purpose sorting machine in place, SingPost has been able to redeploy most of these workers to other departments where additional manpower is needed.

"It's a quantum productivity leap for us and helped us reduce our error rates, especially where the reading of addresses is concerned," said Mr Woo.

Another major initiative has been the gradual rollout of SingPost's new three-wheeler bikes.

Not only are they safer and sturdier compared to the regular and smaller scooters, their storage boxes allow postmen to carry more bulky items in a single trip, said Mr Woo.

Fifty of these three- wheelers are already on the roads, and the plan is to eventually have as many as 300 of them on the roads as the older scooters are replaced.

"A postman used to take an entire day's mail load in one trip with the scooter, but with more bulky items due to online shopping and e-trading, we found that they had to make multiple trips and this was quite unproductive," said Mr Woo.

Giving the thumbs-up to the three-wheelers was inspector of post Rahmad Chik, who told BT that the vehicle is much easier to manoeuvre and handle.

Making fewer trips each day also means that his team of postmen can go home earlier, thereby saving the company from dishing out overtime pay.

SingPost employs some 500 full-time postmen, along with a similar number of contract neighbourhood postmen comprising people such as housewives.

Mr Woo admitted that the job of a postman is not a glamorous one, given the long hours and the fact that mail has to be delivered rain or shine, but he said steps are being taken to spruce up its image by re-skilling the workers and giving extra monetary incentives.

With postmen taking home about $1,200 a month, those who perform well as a team can receive up to $300 more.

"It's my mission to make the job more attractive to locals so that we don't rely on too many foreigners. Because of the job nature, it's difficult to get younger locals on board so we have had to recruit people from Malaysia and China," he said.

"We have to continue investing for the sake of productivity and future growth," he added.

This article was first published in The Business Times.