Prior to the summer of 2001, Charles Schwab relied on its Brisbane, California, processing center to process daily customer mailings along with both monthly and quarterly account statements. Despite contracts with several outsource providers, Schwab's steadily evolving growth in volume eventually hit the Brisbane facility's maximum. As a result, Schwab decided to build a second processing center in Coppell, Texas, to complement the Brisbane facility.

The Schwab facility is a state-of-the-art automated document factory (ADF). Bodi Engineering was retained to assist in site selection. Bodi ultimately designed and helped implement the manufacturing infrastructure. As the project developed, the team grew to include architects, engineers, construction contractors, network specialists, systems integrators, communications analysts, security consultants, interior designers and internal consultants.

Designing the Document Factory

Bodi Engineering used a 10-year planning horizon to design of the new facility. The work was based on mail volumes, growth forecasts and assessment activities. Schwab performed a detailed analysis of regional mail densities to determine the most efficient way to split processing between the Brisbane and Coppell facilities. The results were combined with growth projections to determine the number of printers, inserters and ancillary equipment needed to operate the facility.

The plan included a mix of 27 Pitney Bowes letter-sized and flat-mailing inserters, 13 IBM Infoprint 4000 duplex printing systems and two Pitney Bowes 156 bin MLOCR sorters. The facility would house eight production activities including printing, inserting, presorting, postal routing and destination, literature fulfillment, hand processing of large jobs and warehouse functions.

Once these activities were defined, Systematic Layout Planning (SLP) was used to develop space requirements and understand the relationships between activities. SLP is an interactive process where our clients work with the contracting party to design and achieve the final results they want. Space requirements and activity relationships are used to develop alternative block plan layouts. Once a final block plan layout is selected, the team uses it to develop the detailed equipment layout. With a final layout agreed upon, architects are able to finalize the overall facility design. Developing the final design at Schwab required a number of iterations a moving target caused by equipment vendor options, planning revisions and application changes.

Modern Material Handling

The printers and inserters selected for this operation were expensive and sophisticated. Most mailers surround these millions of dollars worth of islands of automation with pallet loads of inventory, layers of pin feed and paper dust and clumsy postal machines, but not at Schwab. It became clear that this approach would not work for an installation with 27 inserters. Modern manufacturing principles were required for this project, and the team chose to install automated conveyor systems by Ermanco. Here is a breakdown of the equipment and how it works:

Material ordering system Operators order materials on an as-needed basis. This eliminates storing pallet loads of raw material on the production floor. When a carton of materials is needed, inserter operators scan a menu of barcodes for each item. The warehouse operator removes the top of the carton and places the carton on the conveyor system. Conveyor-mounted barcode scanners direct the carton to the correct inserter where it slides down a chute onto the operator's roller conveyor worktable.

Trayed mail takeaway conveyor Trayed mail from each inserter is placed onto takeaway conveyors. The takeaway conveyors act as both storage and transportation, eliminating the need to provide staging space and the labor to push heavy carts. When the OCR sorter operators are ready for the first pass, the conveyor system transports the trayed mail from inserting to presorting.

Corrugate carton conveyor A system of conveyors is provided to transport empty corrugated cartons from each inserter and carton tops removed in the warehouse. Inserter operators do not need to crush the empty cartons; they simply toss the cartons onto the conveyor. The conveyors transport the corrugated material to a compactor ready for hauling to a recycling facility. There is no need for recycling containers on the production floor.

Vacuum trim removal In a typical mail processing facility, pin-feed waste is either dropped on the floor, into containers or wrapped up on collection devices. In all cases, it's a messy operation. At Schwab, a vacuum trim removal system removes pin-feed waste and dust and transports it through a system of pipes to a cyclone separator. Waste is fed into a compactor for recycling. The result is a clean and dust-free environment. Between the corrugate conveyor and the waste removal, janitorial labor is virtually eliminated.

OCR conveyors Typically, OCR sorters are labor-intensive. Most operations rely on shelving systems and heavy APC carts for staging and moving mail. At Schwab, all OCR material handling is eliminated by a system of conveyors that automatically routes presorted mail trays to the operators, away from sorting and back to the second pass. The conveyors transport finished mail to a destination and routing system that weighs each tray, calls the airline to make a reservation and then applies a D&R tag to each tray, indicating the flight numbers. Whether mail goes by air or is routed to a particular post office, a system of conveyors automatically diverts each tray according to the correct destination.

ADF Software Systems

Charles Schwab already had a state-of-the-art ADF system in its existing Brisbane facility, and it wanted nothing less in Texas. However, opening a second print center introduced important new operational problems. For example, load balancing across multiple print centers, cross-site failover, and real-time tracking needed to be addressed. Furthermore, the new print center had to come online smoothly, without any possibility of interrupting ongoing production in the existing print center. IBM was retained to design a multisite print infrastructure. 

The multisite management system, known as Document Delivery Infrastructure (DDI), provides a consistent interface and rerouting capability for all production jobs. Schwab has a diverse mix of applications including significant volume from both MVS and LAN applications, so all applications are routed into DDI. From there, workflow can be routed to either processing center or directly to an outsource vendor.

Another feature of the integration is that the interface to the system can be accessed from both Schwab print centers and also back-office control workstations, giving the entire enterprise a consistent view of both production sites. Integrated tracking and reporting provide real-time status of all print jobs.

After jobs arrive, the Document Tracking System (DTS) manages jobs through the printing and insertion process. Detailed job performance information is collected automatically, so a complete job history is available for each job as it is tracked through the production facility. Most importantly, the DTS system automates the handling of reprints. Creating reprints is often a very difficult task that requires manual entry of account information as well as retransmission of the original application. At Schwab, the DTS automatically identifies any mailpieces that must be reprinted (damaged, missing, etc.) and automates the reprint process on the shop floor. The system can also "rebarcode" the reprints so that the job can be managed as a sequential mailing on the inserter equipment.

Results

Charles Schwab's document processing operation at the Coppell facility is arguably the most modern and efficient anywhere. Operators are efficient, effective and enthusiastic because everything they need is literally at their fingertips. The two centers work seamlessly together, and productivity is well beyond expectations. We are proud to be associated with this genuinely state-of-the-art automated document factory.

Jim Bodi is the president of Bodi Engineering, an industrial engineering firm that specializes in designing document processing operations. Contact him at jbodi@bodiengineering.com. Scott Mastie is a senior solutions architect for IBM, and he was the architect for the DDI and DTS infrastructure described in detail in this case study. He holds a number of patents for IBM. Contact him at mastie@us.ibm.com.