For almost 100 years, Japs-Olson Company, a full-service direct mail provider based in St Louis Park, Minnesota, has remained in the forefront of the document-processing industry by identifying new and creative ways to make its customers more competitive. Though sophisticated CRM strategies and one-to-one marketing has made this more challenging in recent years, the company has automated manual processes and utilized personalization to advance capacity and the level of customization for its clients.
Changing Customer Requirements
The trend toward one-to-one customization of documents and complete mailpiece integrity is having a considerable impact upon traditional mailing processes. Lead times are dwindling, variability of applications is increasing, and the chasm between standard and highly customized jobs is disappearing. Despite the various challenges this presents for conventional printing and mailing processes, customers are concurrently challenging document processors to verify the integrity of production.
According to Japs-Olson President, Michael Murphy, "The increase in target marketing has challenged us to find more professional and economical ways to provide accurate personalized pieces to our clients." By processing all parts of a customer's job, from design to post, Japs-Olson understands how process improvements in one area of production can have a significant impact on the turnaround and costs of the entire project. The ability to merge these process improvements with increased personalization has been a significant factor in the company's continued growth.
Matched Mail Jobs A Big Problem
Prior to last year, matched mail jobs necessitated high labor costs and time-consuming production steps. Jobs containing the merging of multiple personalized pieces within a closed-face envelope required offline personalization before being introduced to the inserter. The multiple personalized inserts were merged with the primary document on the inserting equipment, relying on the proper loading and feeding of this equipment to ensure matching accuracy. Equipment operators manually inspected every 50 pieces to verify the matching of personalized components and the closed-face envelope. When a mismatch was identified, all pieces within that batch were manually inspected and reconciled. This elevated production costs and required extensive re-work when an error was identified.
Application Challenges
"The problem with this process was that it created gaps in production for both productivity delays and human error," explains Murphy. "We needed to find an automated method for improving speed, accuracy and, ultimately, cost." For a solution to be practical in Japs-Olson's ever changing environment, it needed to support quick turnaround times and prove reliable enough to support a 24 hours a day, seven days a week production schedule. Japs-Olson identified an automated means for matching the personalized inserts and inline printing of the closed-face envelopes camera-based inserter matching.
Camera-based inserter matching ensures that the intended recipient's personalized pieces match when inserted into a blank closed-face envelope. It accomplishes this by reading an identifier (unique only to the recipient) from each personalized insert and ensuring that these matched pieces are merged into the same envelope. Upon identifying a mismatched mailpiece, the system automatically stops the inserter and indicates in which pocket the mismatch has occurred. The operator then removes the defective piece(s) and continues production.
The offline envelope printing process has been replaced by an inkjet printer mounted inline with the inserter. The printing solution is integrated with the camera system such that the camera reads from the primary document and then is sent to the inkjet printer. This provides the printing equipment with the pointer to the database to identify which record of variable information needs to be printed. The inkjet controller then tracks each mailpiece through the inserter and onto the mailing base. The document is tracked based on encoder pulses, cycle counts, sensor reads, time and distance to ensure that the proper name, address and variable information is printed on the correct corresponding envelope. "The inkjet controller is intelligent enough to know if a document has been added to the production stream or removed from the stream during production it tracks each document to ensure the proper variable information are applied to the correct piece," says Murphy. "Yet, it provides a simple enough interface to allow our operators to manage the matching and inkjet printing processes."
The Payoff
The new workflow has eliminated offline printing process, manual inspection and batching of the inserter production. "By simplifying a complex process, we enabled our inserting equipment to run at maximum speed, reduced error rates to a negligible value and dramatically reduced labor expenses" adds Murphy. "The bottom line is that we can price our solutions more aggressively due to the automation now in place." Additionally, if a client requests proof of production, a report can be generated from either the matching or inkjet system to prove production integrity and provide an audit trail for each document processed.
The demands for product customization and creative ways to personalize documents will continue to challenge the production environment. The merging of advertisements on transactional documents and personalized magazine and brochure pages was deemed impractical a decade ago. Yet, through automation, they are both common in today's document-processing environment. Similarly, the prevalence of customers requiring access to the status and integrity of production is shifting from sporadic to commonplace in today's marketplace.
Japs-Olson has grown to over 700 employees by understanding customer requirements and utilizing automation and personalization to stay a step ahead of the competition. The company's longevity and continued growth testifies well to the importance of merging personalization with automation.
Pat Hoskins is vice president of Lake Image Systems. For additional information, please call him at 585-421-9290 or e-mail phoskins@lakeimage.com.
