Overview

In the Green paper on postal services in 1992 the European Commission emphasized the need to establish common rules for the development of community postal services and the improvement of quality of service. The European Commission acknowledged that the different postal traditions and cultures in Europe would not allow for the establishment of one common unified European measurement system and that national systems should have sufficient degrees of freedom to reflect national needs and peculiarities. On the other hand, they should fulfil a defined set of minimum requirements to satisfy the information interests of the national regulatory authority, postal customers and postal operators themselves. The objective of the measurement is to estimate the transit time quality of service given to the customer in each European country domestically and cross-border between the European countries. This European Standard refers to a number of principles and minimum requirements to be applied for the measurement of the transit time of single piece non-priority mail. This European Standard for single piece non-priority mail has been developed from EN 13850:2012. Both standards consider methods using a representative end-to-end sample of addressed letter mail. The additional specifications in this European Standard are required to define the minimum confidence levels for the measurement of non-priority mail. When EN 14508 was first developed it was decided to base it on existing measuring systems already in use among the European Union member states. The expansion of the European Union increased the number of cross-border mail flows and the standard was adapted in 2007 to make it possible to economically measure a larger number of mail flows from a wider range of countries. This was achieved by categorizing mail flows for measuring purposes and extending the measurement over a consecutive number of years. In the earlier versions of EN 13850 and EN 14508 the requirements for the Minimum Sample Size (MSS) were given in terms of accuracy requirements for domestic and cross-border measurement systems. The basis of this was an accuracy calculation method which linked any accuracy requirement directly to a corresponding MSS. The improved accuracy calculation method in EN 13850:2012 introduced a number of consequences which made it difficult to hold up this link. Annex B explains these consequences and how they have been overcome.

Document: references other documents

Responsible national committee

NA 043-03-04 AA - Postal services  

Responsible european committee

CEN/TC 331/WG 1 - Customers, products and Services