With the recent rollback of the exigent surcharge, we should be experiencing a savings in our postal spend. But have you reviewed your jobs to make sure you are squeezing every dollar you can?

With the acceptance of electronic receipt of invoices, EOBs, and statements, many jobs are no longer qualifying for the greatest mail density. While it is great that your actual postal spend is down, the reality is that you may be experiencing a cost per piece increase. How is that happening?

Simply put, you no longer qualify for the all-sorted discount criteria. So what can you do to fix the problem? Usually, you go to your IT department and ask for job consolidation to increase your job size back to where it was. But most IT departments are under pressure for other projects, and it could take months for them to get to your project, which in turn negatively impacts your bottom line.

The solution is post-composition toolsets that let you combine your jobs, submit the new combined job back to your presort software, and once again start enjoying the lower cost-per-piece. Post-composition tools are easy to use, affordable, and let you quickly re-tool your jobs for maximum savings.

As a test, I took three sample jobs that had decreased from approximately 8,000 customers to around 5,000 each. I ran the jobs through my postal software and calculated the costs. Then I combined all three jobs, resulting in a new size of 15,000, and realized an additional 8% savings. Yes, 8% is not much, but day in and day out, it has contributed to a substantial savings over the month and year.

The bottom line? Now is the time to review your operation and see where you can “Mine for Gold” in your printstreams.

David Day, EDP brings over 32 years of experience in the document management & mail industry. As an active member of Xplor for over 17 years, David frequently presents at local and global Xplor meetings. He has also been a guest speaker at various company user and industry groups including National Postal Forum, Graph Expo and Mailcom. David, Product Marketing Manager at CrawfordTech, is responsible for their Enterprise Output Management Products. He works with customers, prospects, sales and product development to identify customer requirements, evaluate solutions and make product recommendations.