Mailing Systems Technology - May/June 2008 - (Page 32)

Operations RESOLUTION The speed and accuracy in which mail is sorted and routed impacts overall business eﬃciency. It is diﬃcult to ﬁnd an industry or a company that can aﬀord to ignore the importance of incoming mail processing. Eﬃcient processing is particularly valuable in remittance/payment environments that deal with time-sensitive and/or valuable documents. Delayed deposits cost banks and investment companies customer goodwill and interest. As the speed of business accelerates and the use of overnight deliveries steadily increases, the problem of misplaced parcels, mail, faxes and ﬁles is more critical than ever. And in companies that receive product samples, lost parcels can mean lost opportunities, time and dollars. Research shows that, depending on company size and correspondence volume, at least 2% to 2.5% of all mail is either misplaced or subjected to an in-house delivery delay. This increases to 3% for any company that has more than one site. These percentages may sound small; however, in terms of lost potential business, they highlight a serious problem. For a company receiving up to 100 pieces of mail per day, about 600 are either delayed or misplaced annually. If just 10% of these mailpieces are customer-related, the company will miss 60 opportunities for potential revenue, contracts, payments, customer inquiries and/or satisfaction. In the case of a large company, the negative impact of misplaced or incorrectly sorted mail is even more critical. For example, for companies like E.ON Westfalen Weser, with an annual volume of incoming mail approaching 500,000 mailpieces, 3% of delayed and misplaced items can mean about 15,000 dissatisﬁed customers. The paradox is that even though organizations understand the importance of timely and accurate delivery of incoming mail, the processes of sorting and tracking are often still done manually. This has been an area considered A SUCCESSFUL Efficient sorting, distributing and processing of incoming mail through automation By Dr. Tatiana Vazioulina or small companies and large enterprises alike, mail continues to be an integral part of the document workﬂow. In a typical mail center today, 60% to 70% of the labor is spent sorting incoming and interoﬃce mail. Incoming mail is deﬁned as those mailpieces that are received by any company, and in addition to the postal address, contain company-speciﬁc addressee information, such as name, title, department, subdivision and other speciﬁc details. Unlike the postal address, this information is not regulated by strict rules, and it may appear in a great variety of formats on the mailpiece. Enterprises are confronted with the problem of sorting, distributing and processing incoming F mail on a daily basis. These processes are laborious, expensive and time-consuming, and deal not just with letters and postcards, but with an increasing number of other formats including ﬂats, accountable mail such as FedEx, UPS or USPS Express Mail, parcels and faxes. It is comparatively easy to manage the ﬂow of incoming mail in small companies: often it is enough to read only the ﬁrst and last name on an envelope. However, the problem tends to grow with the size of a company. In large corporations, the structure of addresses may include multiple ﬁelds that conform to complex rules and various priorities that have to be considered to unambiguously locate an addressee. 32 MAY-JUNE 2008 | WWW.MAILINGSYSTEMSTECHNOLOGY.COM http://www.mailsystemstechnology.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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