featured project Archive

Making Post Offices Disability-Friendly

The Postal Service needed to upgrade 28,000 post offices around the country to comply with new standards for patrons with physical disabilities and to determine the cost of that compliance. Within 90 days, LMI found a simple solution to this massive endeavor by equipping 200 field inspectors with a hand-held device whose software replicated their paper-and-pen approach. The device allowed inspectors to collect, consolidate, and verify assessment data.

The sophisticated, self-updating mobile software enabled them to record compliance with accessibility standards and to upload inspection results, explanatory text, proposed corrective actions, cost estimates, and digital photographs to a central, web-accessible database. The approach standardized and accelerated data collection, simplified analysis, minimized errors, and ultimately saved the Postal Service millions of dollars in contract labor. The mobile system became a fast, accurate way to assess the cost of compliance as well as a management tool for tracking compliance status.