National Marina Day

Attention USPS Members: 

Take part in this year’s National Marina Day activities with a neighboring marina by demonstrating the best your squadron has to offer at this one-day-only event on 8 August.  USPS is joining forces with the Association of Marina Industries (AMI) and encourages local squadrons to offer your resources to make their local marina event an even greater one with your squadron’s support.  Suggest vessel safety checks, boating seminars, safety exhibits, skills demonstrations, an introduction to Boat Operator Certification and America’s Boating Course, Third Edition, and whatever else you feel comfortable promoting.  Remember, too, of importance to all our nation’s marinas, U.S. Power Squadrons supports the U.S. Coast Guard’s homeland security campaign, “America’s Waterway Watch,” and also offers our own “America’s Waterway Awareness” program.  If your local marina hasn’t contacted you yet, feel free to touch base with them about designing a blockbuster program.  For more information about National Marina Day, check out the following website, www.marinaassociation.org/nmd/

 

If you need additional information about our USPS involvement in this event, please contact Stf/C Dick Gercak, assistant chairman of the Government and Partner Relations Committee, at captaindick1@aol.com

 

Where's My Order Update

Shortly after the Annual Meeting in Anaheim, we found ourselves in a bit of a bind at headquarters. Our shipping backlog was growing at an alarming rate. Courses and seminars were in jeopardy as SEO’s anxiously called to check on the status of their orders.

How could this happen?
As a starting point, the warehouse workload always increases before and after a national meeting. Equipment, flags, banners, seat packets, and Ship’s Store must be packed and shipped before the meeting. After the meeting, many of the materials are returned to headquarters and must be unpacked and stored. Just to make things interesting, district conferences follow closely on the heels of the national meetings and the warehouse must pack and ship the district Ship’s Store. If we add to this the orders for spring courses and seminars, we have the makings of a big backlog.

As you may be aware, headquarters has been operating with reduced staff and the warehouse is bare bones. Oh yeah, we are in the middle of a recession and everyone is working to reduce expenses, so we reduced the headquarters hours. Needless to say, this did not help the situation.

What was done?
Given the fact that we are moving from a dues based organization to a marketing based organization, shipping our product is very important. The Chief declared that our top priority was shipping those orders. Mary Catherine Berube, headquarters director, responded by rallying the troops at headquarters and everyone pitched in and helped in the warehouse. Much was learned in this process. Shipping an order can be quite complicated. It’s not as simple as it sounds. While the backlog was reduced under the all hands assault, it was finally brought under control by increasing warehouse hours.

While studying the situation, we have added email notification when orders are entered into the system and when they are shipped. We have also begun tracking our performance. The headquarters team has compiled a list of steps we to simplify and enhance productivity in the warehouse.

In addition to expediting shipments, C/C Maynard brought in an expert in the warehouse business, P/V/C Robert Baldridge, to lead a group charged with studying our current system, setting shipping objectives, and developing a plan to achieve them. The group met in Raleigh and reviewed current practices and even shipped a few orders. Robert is summarizing the groups work which will be presented to the board of directors in June.



We recognize that the timely shipment of courses and materials is essential to our success and we intend to make continuous improvements.

Dave Hinders

National Secretary

July Trailer Boating Ad

PIN vs ZIP

Most people understand that logging on (as you must do before reaching the member only part of the USPS website) using a certificate number and ZIP code is far from secure. To make this identification process more certain, we elected to assign a unique PIN to every member. Now we could have sent a notification letter to each member via first class mail, but the costs would have been prohibitive. Instead, to save money, we elected to include the PIN code notification as part of the dues renewal package that goes to each member a couple of months before their membership renewal date.
Unfortunately, members have either

• 
  discarded the mail without reading it;
• 
  wrongly inferred from the fact that it came with the dues renewal package that it was now necessary to use the PIN to logon to pay dues online;
• 
  read the instructions on the yellow insert and followed them.
  

Because we were getting so many questions, we put up a lengthy explanation on the Information Center pages explaining how to recover from a lost PIN, etc.
http://www.usps.org/cgi-bin-nat/tools/pages.cgi?pins

The PIN code has nothing to do with paying dues. Sometime within the next year when you receive your dues renewal, look for the PIN code and yellow insert and follow the instructions on it.

When all of this has settled down, and everyone has a PIN code and has chosen a security question and answer, we will be able to create web based facilities that require absolute identification of the member on the other end of the connection.

R/C John R. Bradley, SN

June 2009 Operations Manual

The JUNE 2009 release of the Operations, Membership, Secretary’s and Treasurer’s Manuals are published and on-line. http://www.usps.org/national/om/html/download.htm

Please know we made every effort to ensure this release is as accurate and current as possible. Included in this release and available for download are the Operations Manual, Membership Manual, Secretary’s Manual and the newly updated Treasurer’s Manual. Either the entire Operations Manual or individual chapters can be separately downloaded as needed. In the Operations Manual, please note that Chapter 13 is the text of the Membership Manual, Chapter 15 is the text of the Secretary's Manual and Chapter 17 is the text of the Treasurer's Manual. The stand-alone manuals include a cover, title page, index of URLs and an index.

Know there are substantial updates in this release. Each section on dues was rewritten based on the USPS-wide adoption of HQAB; the history chapter was updated with the latest events since 2000, the Treasurer’s manual was substantially rewritten and updated, as well as was chapter six of the Operations Manual. Several minor updates were made throughout each manual and reviewed by all concerned before publishing. Should you find any inconsistencies, please email the committee and let us work to resolve them.

1) PLEASE NOTE that we request you advise your webmasters to LINK to their respective pages/documents on the Operations Manual website vice copying the documents to their web space. Historically, there will continue to be both major and minor updates to each manual during the coming year. By linking to the document, they will not have to copy the updated document to their web space each time a new release is announced; and

2) PLEASE NOTE I will cut the master CD for Lena so she can get it duplicated for the Commander’s Kits on or around the first of June, two weeks hence. If you find any problem in any manual within the next two weeks, please let me know before then so I may include the updates in the master CD.

Stf/C Harry Hebb, SN

For the Committee

NOAA Conducting a Survey

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Office of Coast Survey is seeking to determine whether USPS members are satisfied with the products and services they have received, and whether they have suggestions as to how the services can be improved or made more useful. This information will be used to improve NOAA products and services. Email messages have been sent to USPS members asking that they would complete the survey.

A link is shown below to a questionnaire which can be completed on line. This survey should take no more than 10 minutes time – it has been designed with check boxes so it should be easy to complete. 

Please click on the following link to access the questionnaire.  You will be asked for a password, which will be your email address.  

http://sol1.surveyshop.com/surveylogin.asp?k=123998392579

All data collected in this survey will be analyzed according to the specifications of the Market Research Society’s Code of Conduct, which assures confidentiality to those participating in the survey.  The information provided by answering the questionnaire will only be used for statistical analysis.

When you have completed the questionnaire please click on the “SUBMIT” button, then wait for the NOAA Website to show.  This will ensure we receive your responses.  Strategy, Research & Action Inc, a company that specializes in research on Charts and other Cartographic products, will receive the sent surveys and analyze the questionnaires and provide NOAA with the statistical results.  Please complete the survey by the 15^th May, 2009.

If you have any comments regarding this survey or any other aspect of this collection of information, please contact Matthew Kroll, National Ocean Service, 1315 East-West Highway, SSMC3, Room 6360, N/CS5, Silver Spring, Maryland 20910.