One thing I learned working with large corporations is the official mail center wasn’t the only mail-generation place in the company. I sometimes stumbled over rogue postal operations hidden away in storerooms and the back corners of departments. Departmental budgets never itemized the expenses for these shadowy postal operations, so most department heads were unaware of the cost. In most cases, the small document and mailing facilities had existed for years with practically no oversight.

I uncovered administrative assistants buying stamps and depositing mail in blue boxes down the street. On other occasions, employees used tabletop postage meters leased to departments to apply full-rate postage to occasional letters and flats. Sometimes employees made special trips to a local post office to enter mail into the postal system.

Unnecessarily high postage costs and employee time to handle the mail made these departmental mailing operations dubious investments. Rental fees and the cost of money stored on the hidden mailing machines as pre-paid postage made the actual cost of low volume mailings exceedingly high.

Mailing projects placed in the hands of non-professionals can lead to interesting solutions. I ran across several cases where departmental administrative assistants printed two or three personalized pages on different paper stock, sometimes on different printers. Then they printed labels, requiring them to do a complex manual match to assemble the mail pieces. Simple design changes would have eliminated this laborious and error-prone process, but employees lacked the necessary knowledge and resources.

Office workers tend to use whatever equipment is convenient. They may send ill-fitting page volumes to devices like desktop printers. Large print jobs commonly run overnight to avoid monopolizing a printer during work days. Unfortunately, unmonitored devices can be subject to degrading print quality, empty ink and toner cartridges, or jams. Employees would arrive at work the next morning to discover unsatisfactory results, with no other option but rerunning the jobs.

Ironically, one organization hired a managed services company to run their print center. Because the company normally produced less than their contracted page count minimum, transferring jobs from departments to the centralized print center would have cost the company nothing!

Once while investigating branch office complaints of late and missing incoming mail, I found design-it-yourself business reply envelopes (BREs). Unaware of pre-printed intelligent mail barcodes and ZIP+4 functionality for business reply, someone at the branch copied elements from the BRE of a local insurance agency. A quick printer created the envelopes using the branch-supplied artwork. Unless the local post office employees intercepted them, the USPS delivered BREs meant for the branch office to the neighborhood insurance company! Eventually, most of the mail made its way back to the intended destination, but delays caused by flawed envelope design affected customer service and productivity.

Alternative mail operations spring up for a variety of reasons:

• Company employees don’t know about the services supplied by corporate print and mail centers
• Mistrust of the centralized facility (possibly stemming from past experiences)
• Belief that mail with full rate postage reaches its destination faster than envelopes bearing discounted postage
• Employee ignorance of document center job submission processes
• Fear of departmental charge-backs from the print/mail center, or belief that departments can do the work “for free”
• Desire to handle projects within the department
• Perception of long document center lead times
• Embarrassment from lack of mailing process knowledge