Mailing Systems Technology - May/June 2008 - (Page 20)

Trends Editor’s Note: This is the third and ﬁnal installment in a series on implementing an Automated Document Factory (ADF) strategy. The ﬁrst two installments explored the origins of the ADF concept and major beneﬁts of implementing an ADF solution. Document Factory By Mike Maselli number of market and industry conditions drive the revitalized demand for Automated Document Factory solutions and techniques. Postage Optimization The cost of postage has risen 24% in just the past eight years, and organizations stand to lose millions if they fail to comply with everchanging USPS regulations. An ADF helps organizations work within the changing post oﬃce guidelines and employ advanced postal techniques to mitigate these rising expenses, as they forward to the days of seamless acceptance and connectivity with the USPS. An ADF can help companies avoid hidden ineﬃciencies that could result in additional signiﬁcant postage overruns. The USPS reports that nearly one-fourth of all mail that goes through its system contains errors that result in being returned to sender. The expense of undeliverable mail can be considerable, with additional costs including a returned mail fee plus the postage to re-mail the corrected piece. An ADF minimizes the impact of these hidden costs by automatically cleansing addresses and updating pieces before they are printed and mailed. Regulatory Compliance Mailpiece integrity and security are at the heart of regulatory compliance for any organization responsible for printing and mailing corporate documents. The implications across major industry markets have been noteworthy. The adopting an automated Part 3: The revitalized demand Cost of Operations The cost of day-to-day operations must be a primary concern for any proﬁtable organization. An ADF can lower the ongoing expense of printing and mailing by automating manual processes and instituting automated production tracking and monitoring. As in the manufacturing industry, the notion of “super-eﬃcient” document processing allows for an internal workﬂow to proceed with very few interruptions or errors: manual processing is minimized, and shop supervisors track and adjust workloads in real time. When errors do occur, an ADF allows organizations to quickly recover without the need for exhaustive human intervention or rework. Organizations look to an ADF solution to lower costs by optimizing performance and managing diversity within the various components while applying manufacturing-like precision across the entire document production process. Organizations beneﬁt from the ability to track operator eﬃciencies and examine how well hardware and applications perform in the ﬂow of production. A Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act in health care, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in public accounting and the Gramm-LeachBliley Act in the ﬁnancial sector are just a few of the now-iconic regulations placing documents squarely in the crosshairs of compliance oﬃcers and legal counsel. Common among these statutes is the requirement to protect sensitive customer data and demonstrate dutiful custodianship of the information. The increasing need for information security and mailpiece tracking is driving the demand for more elaborate ADF veriﬁcation and quality control systems, and speciﬁcally for recently developed camera or “vision” systems that literally read data from individual pages and envelopes to insure quality, integrity and security. Piece tracking, long valued among mailers for its ability to verify that the correct mailpieces with the correct contents are being successfully processed, is now a capability of interest to the printing industry, as data-driven documents demand increased levels of veriﬁcation and control. Integrity and quality checks in printing can save time and money by stopping a job as soon as an error occurs. Recent developments in ADF technology now allow “host to post” monitoring of document integrity and security throughout a production operation across some or all processes. 20 MAY-JUNE 2008 | WWW.MAILINGSYSTEMSTECHNOLOGY.COM http://www.mailingsystemstechnology.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Mailing Systems Technology - May/June 2008

Mailing Systems Technology - May/June 2008 Contents Editor’s Note Peer to Peer It’s an Inside Job Greening Your Mail Center Adopting an Automated Document Factory Intelligent Mail and Address Quality 7 Steps to Combat “Do Not Mail” A Successful Resolution Q&A with Dan G. Blair, Chairman, Postal Regulatory Commission The Intelligent Mail Barcode Developing High-Performance Teams Simple Strategies to Save You Money A Powerful Social Network With Change, Comes Opportunity Increasing the Deliverability of Mail Kate’s Slate Products & Services People of Distinction Advertiser Index Sho Time

Mailing Systems Technology - May/June 2008

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