Mike Porter

President, Print/Mail Consultants
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July 10 2020
Mistakes have always been part of the game when high volumes of paper are imaged, moved, folded, and inserted. Back in my days in the service bureau industry, we had unintelligent inserters an
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June 29 2020
Document production workflows can be fragile things. The process of creating printed documents from data acquisition to depositing mail at the post office is frequently a series of complex unc
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May 11 2020
During my service bureau career, I was involved in the production of transactional documents like bills, notices, and statements. We inserted every document into a window envelope. We had a wa
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May 4 2020
Some marketers were showing signs of renewed interest in physical mail as an effective way to make an impression and stand out from the crowd. And then… well, you know what happened when the
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April 15 2020
By nature, I'm a perfectionist. I'll work on an article or a document layout until I'm satisfied I can't make it any better. I've spent hours searching for just the right illustrations to
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March 27 2020
Everyone dreads a data breach. We constantly hear about companies who have fallen victim to ransomware, phishing, and data theft. No one is immune, not even companies who print and mail docume
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March 13 2020
Mail has a reputation issue, and part of it is generational. Although mail is effective and accepted among all groups, the relationship between people and their mail varies among the generations. Prin
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Feb. 19 2020
The mail center is at the tail end of a long process that starts with a communication strategy and ends with a pile of print to be finished and mailed. By the time mail center managers see the
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Feb. 12 2020
Sometime this month take a stroll through the back of your mail center. Somewhere stashed out of sight you might notice stacks of mail trays filled with returned mail. It’s a condition I obs
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Feb. 10 2020
The Postal Service’s financial woes are well known. The problems are complex, but some say postal banking could be a new revenue stream that helps the USPS out of its money problems
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Dec. 12 2019
As organizations devote more resources to developing electronic messaging, I’ve been thinking about what would happen if print wasn’t part of the customer communications landscape. Some...
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Nov. 4 2019
A popular buzzword in the printing industry is “convergence,” which describes efforts by printing companies to expand into areas adjacent to their traditional product lines. Print companie
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Oct. 29 2019
If nothing’s wrong with your print and mail operation, why should you change it? We’ve all probably suffered through painful experiences when attempts to improve a process resulted in disr
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Oct. 7 2019
What is the impact to your organization if an average transactional document, such as a bill, gets damaged during the inserting operation in your print and mail facility? How much could such a
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Sept. 13 2019
Companies in the printing and mailing business have a problem. To potential clients, organizations like these all look the same. Customers expect anyone they entrust with their transactional
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Sept. 10 2019
Over the last couple of years, analysts and vendors have written much about workflow systems. Software vendors refer to these solutions as dashboards or integration platforms. This is software
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Sept. 1 2019
Unless you are truly “off the grid,” you’re living in a tech world with the rest of us. You’ve probably got personal experience with online banking, shopping, ride sharing, social...
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Aug. 15 2019
I’ve been attending industry events and conferences lately, covering various aspects of the document industry, including transactional print, commercial print, and mailing. While the
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July 8 2019
Everyone has a different idea about the impact of undelivered mail. Most times, the estimates are way too low. The cost of paper, ink, and wasted postage is just the start, so I prefer to look a
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June 26 2019
Print and mail operations use tracking systems like automated document factory (ADF) software to monitor and record work as it processes through the shop. These systems are particularly importan

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