Information Technology Impact on Process Output and Quality

Our work represents one of the first attempts to assess the impact of IT (information technology) on both process output and quality. We examine the optical character recognition and barcode sorting technologies in the mail sorting process at the United States Postal Service. Our analysis is at the application level, and thus does not involve the aggregation of IT impact over multiple processes. We use data from 46 mail processing centers over 3 years to study the IT impact. We also use a set of factors in our model to account for differences in input characteristics. Our results show that mail sorting output significantly increases with higher use of IT. In addition, IT improves quality which in turn enhances output. We also find that input characteristics exert considerable influence in determining the output and quality of the mail sorting operation. For example, while absenteeism tends to decrease output and quality due to its disruptive consequences, a higher fraction of barcoded mail seems to enhance both performance measures.