Presort programs like Group 1’s MailStream Plus will enable mailers to earn postal discounts provided their lists have gone through a CASS® approved coding process. First Class mailers will also have to comply with the USPS’s Move Update requirements to earn postage discounts. In addition, Delivery Point barcodes will need to be printed on the mail pieces to earn automation discounts.

The discounts earned will be related to how large and ‘ZIP Code Dense’ the mailing is. If the mailing is to a small geographic area, it will not take a large number of pieces to earn 3 and 5 digit automation discounts. If the mailing is being made to a larger geographic area and is not particularly large, the mailer may only qualify for few 5 Digit discounts, a small number of 3 digit discounts and the rest earning discounts below the 3 digit level.

How can a mailer improve ZIP Code densities to improve postal discounts? A lot will depend on how many mailings are done each day, what kind of mailings they are, how large and ZIP Code dense they may be and how they are printed and produced.

A common scenario is that a mailer may have to do a number of small mailings a day. Each mailing on its own has poor ZIP Code density and does not earn much in postage discounts. If those mailings could be combined into one larger mailing, ZIP Code densities and postage discounts would be improved. This improvement is often referred to as postage discount “lift”. This is what drives return on investment of machine sorting solutions and services.

Before you turn to machine sorting to get this lift, you need to determine if there is any way you can combine these mailings yourself to get postage discount lift without doing machine sorting, either in-house or through an presort service bureau.

The first requirement of ‘electronic commingling’ is being able to print your mailings “on-demand”. Laser printing has become the standard for preparing bills and invoices but is now used to do highly personalized or ‘short turnaround’ documents. If you are printing on demand, are these documents being printed on the same paper stock and if not, does your printer support multiple paper feeds? If the answer to these questions are all “Yes”, and you prepare a number of different jobs each day, you are a candidate for electronic commingling.

Since each job you wish to commingle may use a different software application to generate the output, how can you commingle them? Group 1 Software’s StreamWeaver product can capture the output of each of these applications, “scrape” the address block out of the document, and then run CASS, Move Update and Presort processes for all the jobs you are mailing that day all at once. It will then re-sequence the combined job in presort mailing sequence and allow you to print all of your jobs in a single print run. StreamWeaver can also alter the actual documents themselves which is one of the main reasons some customers use this product.

As the combined job is printed, the mail pieces are placed into sacks and trays in presort sequence, just as if you were creating single job. The pieces are now non-identical in content and most likely piece weight and this creates some new issues:

  1. Q: What if these jobs are being done for different clients or departments that require different return addresses? A: You can either switch to double window envelopes and use StreamWeaver to alter the documents to print a return address in the appropriate Window or you can use Pitney Bowes new high speed envelope printer to print the return address “in-line” at the end of the inserting process.
  2. Q: How do I get the piece attributes of each piece to my presort software so that it can know when a tray or sack is full and a new sack or tray needs to be started? A: Some document composition products that may have created the document can provide that data but StreamWeaver can also provide it from all of the jobs being commingled, no matter what was used to create each of them. MailStream Plus can properly prepare the presort taking into consideration all of the different piece attributes.
  3. Q: How does the USPS verify a non-identical mailing? A: The USPS has several different programs in place to handle non-identical mailing including Optional Procedure, Alternate Procedure and Manifesting. Manifesting may be the simplest to implement and MailStream Plus has an easy to implement Manifest option. Manifesting involves creating postage documentation that accounts for every piece of mail. For “batch manifesting” which cuts down your paperwork in First Class manifested mailings, you must also print a ‘Keyline’ on each piece to identify it. MailStream Plus can supply the information for this keyline.
  4. Q: What if a piece of mail is destroyed in the inserting process? A: If StreamWeaver was used to commingle your mailings, you can use StreamWeaver’s Reprint Client to reprint it and put it into the appropriate sack or tray. If you are using file based intelligent inserter, the “spoiled” piece ID’s can be captured to make the reprint process even easier. In future BLOG postings, I will get more into manifesting options to deal with spoilage and also discuss Pitney Bowes’s DF Works Manifest Module which can remove spoiled pieces from a manifest and requalify the mailing. In that case, your spoiled pieces are reprinted and mailed later.
  5. Q: How do I pay for postage on a manifested mailing? A: Manifested mailings are paid for via a permit which can be funded by advance payment into your permit account or from money transferred automatically from your bank account via the USPS CAPS program.
  6. Q: What if I prefer to pay for my postage via meter imprint? A: Can I still commingle my mail to improve my postage discounts? With the advent of the DM Infinity Meter it would be possible to meter each piece of mail at the exact postage rate determined by MailStream Plus. This capability is under development and if you are interested in doing this, I can put you touch with people at Pitney Bowes who can discuss this with you. An advantage of metering non identical mail at the correct rate is that it may eliminate the need for a manifest. All you would need is an ordinary qualification report.

If you can not print on demand or you have other limitations which make “electronic commingling” of your mailings impossible, the next course of action would be to look at how much mail for each of your mailings would earn a 5 digit discount. It may pay for you to presort only the mail which can earn a 3 or 5 digit discounts and machine sort the rest, either in-house or using a presort service bureau like PSI. Presort bureaus can often improve ZIP Code densities by combining your mail with those supplied by other companies. MailStream Plus can help you machine sort part of your mail by excluding the pieces you are going to machine sort from its presort documentation which is given to the USPS.

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