In today’s business environment, document factory supervisors need to optimize mail piece integrity to ensure quality and reduce costs. Whether volumes are low or high, whether applications are varied or constant, customer expectations must be met. Fortunately, the technology exists to monitor the process as early and often as desired throughout the process in a number of different ways, providing varied levels of granularity depending on the needs of the individual stakeholder. Tracking can be done at the mail piece level, the machine level, the job level, and the site level--even at the enterprise level.

Networking and the Internet provide the conduit for aggregated information from the tracked mail piece to be transmitted, meaning that information that was once left isolated in the mail center can now be shared with key parts of the organization—most notably to call centers, where a rendering of the document can drive more efficient customer service—and marketing, where analytics may paint a more accurate view of the customer, driving one-to-one marketing campaigns.

For example, a web-enabled tracking module allows mailpiece information from each step of the production process to be displayed in an easily interpreted graphical format. Users can see if the document for an individual mailpiece has been printed, inserted and sorted. Each process step is time and date stamped providing valuable information for CRM and production efficiency needs. In applications where return mail (reply cards or payment remittance) is involved a multi-step piece-level tracking module can display the status of the response.

PostBackOffice from Mailcode captures and consolidates valuable data from the mailpiece to provide information that enables new and expanded service offerings—including track and trace, image archiving, scheduling and productivity reporting, billing or postal charge back and marketing or customer service reporting—improved service levels and optimized resources throughout the mail and message process.

To discover more about the benefits of tracking, it may be most helpful to take a look at a couple of tracking methods—at the job level and at the piece level--and discuss their respective value.

Tracking the Job
The results of a 2001 Pitney Bowes survey of 200 mail and document production professionals revealed that 65 percent of respondents whose shops process from 50 to over 100 print/finish jobs per day use either manual job tracking methods or none. In fact, when a stakeholder needed a progress report about a specific job, the operations staff would take a guess at when it might be finished or how long it would be running.

Not surprisingly, sixty-nine percent of all managers surveyed routinely received calls from dissatisfied customers. More than half said they were under internal pressure to reduce costs. Thirty percent said that they had faced financial penalties as a result of missed Service Level Agreements. And over half believed that a tracking solution would help them define work steps and monitor the progress of a specific job across all platforms from initial data processing through printing, mail finishing and ultimately to drop-off with the USPS.

Clearly, the vast majority of print/mail finishing managers lack the means to manage events and resources, have little advance notice of when jobs arrive for processing, virtually no ability to alter the sequence of jobs, or split jobs among multiple resources for faster or more efficient processing once jobs arrive in the center.

As a result, print/mail finish centers must maintain costly excess capacity to handle the unpredictable and inevitable conflicts in demand. Or they must work harder and at a higher cost -- due to overtime expenses-- by 'catching-up' and processing jobs during rest periods, lunch breaks or after the shift ends to meet the promised delivery standard.

Unfortunately, this traps the manager in a never-ending cycle of re-acting to events rather than pro-actively managing resources to accommodate the shifts in demand and priorities that are present in any dynamic work environment. Tracking at the job level can help break that cycle and regain control over the mail production center.

Apples and Oranges
“The first step is to measure a particular entity as it moves through time,” says John Lynch, Director of Software Development for Pitney Bowes docSense. “You cannot begin to understand the nature of a particular job until you collect information and measure its progress through time.”

To track a job is to track each of the work steps that make up that job. Each unit must be counted at the individual work step. Tracking must be done at the work step level, because there are no common units to count. You can’t compare apples to oranges. For example, the units tracked by applications can be bytes, lines, pages or some other unit of measure. Once the print work step occurs, the units counted are likely to be “pages” or linear footage. At the insert step the units might be called “pieces.” “Trays” are a unit within themselves. So are “cages.” But because every work step in the process can be tracked, a profile of the job can be built, just as brushstrokes on a canvas combine to form a painting.

“By monitoring associated work steps one can get the complete picture of production processes, from inception through completion,” says Lynch. “As long as the basic concept of a ‘job’ can be defined by the number of steps it takes to complete that job, the rest is simply a matter of collection.”

An Electronic Efficiency Expert
When measurements have been taken, an analysis of the data can begin to pave the way for better control and understanding of the print/finish environment. In a sense, tracking on the job level is akin to having electronic efficiency expert—you can set up personal bests for the time it took to complete a job and figure out ways to best that time every time out--literally changing from reactive management to proactive management. Once the job data has been aggregated, stakeholders can view the status of their jobs, and generate performance reports. Print/finish managers have an accurate method of measuring work and creating Service Level Agreements.

State Street bank, a leading financial services firm, is achieving remarkable results with a Pitney Bowes product called SiteView. “We can do real-time data collection to help manage the entire print/mail finishing operation more effectively," says Tim McKeon, Manager of Operations Planning for State Street. “In addition, I can provide customers with online access so they can view the actual status of their jobs without the need to interrupt production on the shop-floor.”

Mark Fallon, President and CEO of the Berkshire Company, was the Vice President of Facilities Management at State Street when the job tracking solution was implemented. “SiteView allowed State Street to go to a whole new level,” Fallon said. “It actually helped State Street bring in external customers by using the system as part of the sales process. That’s pretty amazing because you change from being part of the standard operations to being part of the income generating process.”

Piece-Level Tracking
Large volume mailers have increasingly seen the value of file-based processing to provide a link between mainframe or client server-based applications and the production floor. This means that every single document can be tracked right through the system – from raw data through to finished mail piece.

File-based processing is an alternative to controlling documents only by marks on the documents and greatly reduces the size of code on the printed document. The data controlling each mail piece – and the entire mail run – resides in the Mail Run Data File (MRDF), which can be tracked with 100% accuracy. File-based processing creates valuable records about each mail piece including a record of damaged pieces, duplicated or missing pieces and verification of a mailing. If an individual mail piece is missing or damaged, the MRDF stops the process and generates a full report.

File-based processing technology enables complete piece-level tracking of every mail piece. When coupled with the use of exception files and an automated mail piece regeneration capability, it can provide full assurance that every mail piece in any job was produced and delivered to the U.S. Postal Service.

Enhanced Customer Service for Putnam Investments
Kevin Connolly, Senior Vice President of Client Communications for Putnam Investments, oversees the processing of nearly 100 million mail pieces per year at the company’s print/production mail division in Franklin, Massachusetts.

Connolly recently implemented a strategic initiative to evolve Putnam’s document factory from OMR to file-based processing powering intelligent inserters for full control and efficiency.

Because the company’s older inserters ran off of OMR barcodes there was no valid way to track mail pieces. Quality assurance was done by exception and production problems were often discovered only when customers called to say they did not receive their statement in the mail. When those calls came, staff had to estimate the production time frame, locate the proper meter sheets then compare the number of pieces processed that day versus the number of mail pieces taken to the post office. “Definitive answers were a challenge,” said Connolly.

Not so anymore. Using file-based technology, the print mail division now tracks the details and history of each mail piece and each job in a network environment. Piece-level statistics are also available on individual and group performance, productivity, and integrity.

The transformation exceeded Putnam’s expectations on two levels. The corporation can now quickly produce, track and deliver their customer communications in a shorter time frame to achieve higher levels of customer satisfaction and internally maintains precise records of each mail piece.

“We have all the information on-hand to give the customer answers in minutes versus one or two days,” said Kevin Connolly. “The level of accuracy here was very good before but integrating DFWorks with our equipment has tremendously improved our level of quality and integrity and gives us a real audit trail for definitive tracking.”

“Technology is key in preventing those errors. Piece-level tracking has given us a strong quality assurance program based on root cause analysis from the captured data,” said Connolly. “We are learning to control and prevent those errors from re-occurring.”

Independence Day
In the year and a half since beginning implementation, Putnam’s productivity has improved by 30 percent. Additionally, production capacity has increased 23 percent over the last year, while unit and labor costs have held steady.

A large part of Putnam’s output comes from the 4.5 million quarterly statements that must be mailed within five business days from the conclusion of the quarter to comply with SEC regulations. Due to the enhanced productivity gained from file-based processing, Independence Day 2001 was the first time that employees in the document factory didn’t have to give up the holiday because the work was completed on July 3rd.

Kevin Connolly continues to focus on new ways to improve Putnam’s mail piece production. “I see piece level tracking as a revolutionary way to definitively gauge production and integrity standards in a continuing effort to meet and exceed customer expectations,” said Connolly.

With an Objective View, Greater Opportunity
The ability to extract, collect, and consolidate the pertinent data from each mail piece, at each work step, on all the equipment for every job into one database gives managers a more objective view of how well their shops are doing. With access to more details of a job, they are able to monitor job-specific costs, production time, and resource utilization more closely.

As a result, companies can track and schedule jobs more effectively, allocate resources more efficiently, calculate costs and profitability more quickly, identify the areas for improvement more readily and measure the effectiveness of equipment and operators to help achieve maximum processing efficiency. Having these systems in place has allowed the transfer of piece-level information used for document production and factory management into customer-critical, closed-loop, end-to-end customer messaging solutions.

This gives far more control over the processing of each mail piece – including the power to turn routine transactional mail into highly effective 1:1 marketing opportunities. The gains in productivity, in opportunities for fine-tuning marketing messages and in preventing brand damage make document tracking a must have for all high volume mailers.