When it comes to rising postage costs, what goes up will come down again that is, when you let your local presort bureau work its magic on your mail. When using an experienced presort bureau, it can ensure that your company maximizes postal rate discounts while expediting mail delivery to the people who count your customers. Licensed by the United States Postal Service to commingle and combine postage rates and letter weights, presort bureaus aim to make everyone's life easier through automation, speed, efficiency and discounts. In a nutshell, a presort bureau picks up your mail, sorts it using specialized technologies and hands it over safe, sound and sorted to the USPS for fast, economical delivery.
First Class mailers have been taking advantage of commingling for years. An emerging trend of presort bureaus is that direct marketers, ad agencies, printing houses, individual businesses and mail order companies are starting to commingle Standard or market mail as well. With commingling, Standard A mailers can more economically combine and ship both their control mailings as well as test groups. In addition to the expanded discounts for SCF (Section Center Facilities) and BMC (Bulk Mail Centers) entry and actual mail delivery of all groups is now more consistent to each destination. Commingling Standard mail promises to greatly extend a company's reach, impact and potential through the traditional marketing vehicle of direct mail.
The benefits of presort services are no mystery to the businesses that use them. But what happens behind the scenes at a presort bureau is a bit more enigmatic though not nearly as mysterious as the USPS's two-inch-thick manual of complex, ever-changing rules and regulations that businesses are expected to decipher and follow. It's no secret that more companies are outsourcing their mail to reputable presort bureaus to avoid the costly pitfalls of trying to presort their own mail according to the USPS's mind-boggling rules.
Presort bureaus must have day-to-day operations down to a science. In the morning, their customers are preparing mail for pickup, which usually starts around noon and continues in waves throughout the afternoon. As each wave of mail hits the presort bureau, courtesy of a scheduled driver, it is off-loaded and undergoes a series of rigorous quality checks to ensure that the customer has prepared the mail according to USPS guidelines for current meter date, legible meter imprints, correct postage rate and valid permit indicias.
If the problem can be fixed in-house it's done; if not, it's returned to the client. If a customer accidentally metered his mail at $3.01 instead of $0.301, a reliable presort house will let him know immediately so he can correct the problem before running out of postage.
Once quality checks are completed, the mail moves into the automation area where it's barcoded and sorted by ZIP Code. As each mailpiece moves through the system, the computer uses an algorithm to determine the correct barcode for that address. That barcode is sprayed onto the envelope with an inkjet before it is organized by mail destination. Some presort bureaus barcode 100% of the mail they process to ensure that customers receive a discount on every letter.
Maximizing postage savings is all about creating automation-compatible mail, which saves the USPS time and effort. For example, letters can be easily sorted down to the postal carrier route when an 11-digit ZIP Code is used, saving mail carriers hours of hand-sorting letters. This translates into money saved by the USPS, which passes discounts to the letter sender. Once the mail is sorted into the · appropriate trays at the presort house, each tray receives its own destination tag and is sleeved, banded and placed in a container with all of the mail going to that destination. For presort houses with on-site postal verification and plant loading, these containers are placed on authorized postal vehicles and quickly dispatched.
Serving businesses that mail approximately 1,000 or more pieces of First Class and/or Standard mail daily, the highest intensitiy shift is started after most people leave their nine-to-five jobs and head home. Throughout the night and morning hours, the mechanical humming of presort machinery fills the air. With each high-tech presort machine operating at an astounding speed, presort bureaus can process millions of First Class and Standard Mail letters within a 24-hour period.
To sustain this speed, specially trained technicians and machine operators are in constant motion, performing preventative maintenance, keeping computers and networks running, checking cameras and lenses, cleaning and testing inkjet printers and restarting any machines that momentarily shut down due to bin overflow. Everyone has a unique role to play that's an integral part of a bigger scene. In that sense, observing a processing system in action is not unlike watching a carefully choreographed ballet, where the momentum builds until the finale at midnight when the First Class mail leaves center stage for the post office. Then, without losing a beat, Standard mail is put into the system. By
Having the right presort equipment is a critical part of good customer service. Significant improvements in optical character recognition (OCR) technology have improved the success rate for reading hand-written addresses, which means greater savings for presort customers. Better stacker data technology has also translated into higher efficiency for companies. Moreover, the newest presort systems can interact through advanced internal communications systems, giving operators more control.
Mail security should be a top priority for all presort bureaus. Like the USPS, presort bureaus handle checks, credit cards and other valuable pieces of mail, so there's higher potential for mail theft before the mail reaches the post office. Without security, there is also a higher chance of mail damage or delay. Once mail is picked up from a customer, it should be locked up and under surveillance until it's in the hands of the USPS.
For any company that generates a sizable volume of mail, even a penny per letter discount adds up. All told, a presort bureau can reduce your postage expenses by five percent to 10%, a discount that certainly seems magical when budgets are tight. But for the presort bureau, there's nothing magical or mysterious about it it's just business as usual.
Paul Bailey is the president of ProSORT Services located in Burr Ridge, Illinois. In addition to presort services, ProSORT also provides a full line of high-quality lettershop services, including color laser printing. For more information, visit www.prosort.com or call 630-323-0606.
