Broaden Your Business

Merging your in-plant with your organization's mailing operation will bring increased efficiency and savings—and more responsibility.

One way to ensure the future of your in-plant is to make your shop a more integral part of your parent company—and perhaps the most obvious place to look for new responsibilities is the mail room. After all, that's where a great percentage of your print work ends up after you finish with it. Why not take command of the entire chain of events from printing to delivery?

"You don't want to suggest that you'll take over someone else's job," says Domenic Vallone, manager of the production department at the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia—but in many cases the opportunity for merging print and mail services arises naturally.

Vallone, for example, had already been handling printing and graphic design for approximately 10 years when he was asked to incorporate mailing services into his production department, as well. Over time, his department has expanded to include purchasing, an internal messenger service and oversight of the volunteer staff.

When Linda Balsamo was hired by Walgreen's in 1996, her job was to manage the mail shop—but the company had a much bigger role planned for her.

"The current manager [of the print shop] was scheduled to retire a couple of years after I started, so they hired me with the intention of merging the units," says Balsamo, now manager of printing and mail services at the Deerfield, Ill.-based operation. "They had realized that with some of the functions being blurred between the two units it made sense to put them under one area."

Balsamo's annual outgoing mail stream consists of 22,000 priority pieces of recruitment mail, 30,000 to 40,000 first class permit pieces and 40,000 more pieces in the regular mainstream. Her department also handles incoming mail.

Benefits Of Receiving Mail

Selling the idea of a combined print and mail center to your supervisors might be easier than you think.

"One of the things about mail and print that's similar—at least from a managerial point of view—is that it's all handling paper," says Vallone. What's more, he adds, "The guys who were the best at learning how to feed a printing press were able to adjust and adapt quickly to the mail equipment."

In addition to getting more out of your already skilled employees, having them handle both print and mail gets them more involved in every project.

"Whenever you put people together with common goals and purposes, you get away from the 'Not my job' way of thinking," says Cindy Larson, director of printing and mailing services at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota, in Eagan, Minn. "They think on a broader scale because they don't have just a piece of the job."

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota merged its print and mail operations four years ago. Currently 29 people work in mailing services, with another 39 employed in the printing area. The in-plant inserts about 1.65 million pieces each month, Larson says, with an additional 270,000 pieces getting processed through other distribution methods.

By combining print and mail, in-plants say they have been able to catch mistakes earlier in the process.

"We find mailing problems at the beginning of the production cycle that normally wouldn't be seen until they got to the mail facility," Balsamo says. "I can't count the number of times that I've stopped design problems where pieces come through that aren't mailable and I've made suggestions to fix them. I've also made suggestions for paper finishes with regard to bar code readability. High gloss stocks don't exactly work on ink-jet printers."

That mail knowledge also helps you work with designers before printing to save money on postage in the long run.

"We meet with our designers on a daily basis," says Larson. "Anything that's being mailed has to pass by our manager of mailing services, and she looks it over to make sure it's in size, as well as for design features that might interfere with the bar coding. That way we won't lose our mailing discounts."

When Vallone first started dealing with mail services, he discovered that the invitations he was printing weighed in at exactly one ounce. To bring them in under an ounce—and ensure a cheaper rate—he changed the type of envelope used and sized the inserts more carefully. With thousands of invitations going out weekly, that made a big difference in the mail budget.

Conversely, "I know that if I'm going to send something by standard class [the non-profit's 'bulk' rate], I don't have to worry about making it one ounce," Vallone says. "I can go up to thee ounces for the same rate. When you're thinking about this stuff in the design and print area well in advance, you're much better prepared for the entire piece."

Some of the other money-saving changes that Vallone has made include standardizing postcards at 41⁄4x6˝ instead of 5x7˝ (saving 10¢ a postcard, as well as money on paper stock), resizing data center-produced mailers from 113⁄4˝ to 111⁄2˝ (again saving 10¢ a piece) and convincing the women's division to give up their square invitations, which carry a 10¢ "cuteness surcharge," as Vallone describes it.

When you're handling projects from printing to mailing, you also gain more control over the look of completed jobs, as well as the ability to juggle your production schedule.

"If I had three jobs out to three different [mailing] vendors, I couldn't say that priority one was this job because they have 12 priorities besides mine," says Vallone. But when he handles the mailing in-house, "I can make those decisions. I can pull people off the printing presses and put them on the inserting machines. They're all cross-trained so they can do that."

That's a benefit that Cindy Larson finds particularly appealing.

"If you can get all the people in the same work chain working along the same path, you can buy time all the way along that stream," she says. "We are constantly talking about the ultimate date that a project has to go out the door, but in that whole chain of processes, you've got some movement there. For me, the greatest value is that everybody has the same goal in mind: This has to be out the door by this date. So what can we do to get it through all these processes?"

As for the look of the finished work, Vallone says, "If these things are managed in separate departments or brought outside, there's a lack of control over consistency and image. You may not want to send something third class even if you can get away with it if it's a specific type of mailing that you want opened right away."

Before You Grab The Mailbag…

As you might have gathered from these managers' experiences, handling mail is more than just slapping on stamps and throwing the letters in the postbox.

"Mail is a lot more complicated than people think," says Balsamo. "It requires a huge learning curve for people who have never been in the business. When I took over mail services at the University of Illinois [prior to Walgreen's], I didn't know anything about mail other than what a stamp costs. It probably took me 12 months before I felt comfortable with the rules and regulations. No matter what, you're bound to make mistakes along the way, but if you do your homework and go to the postal forums and learn the equipment and rely on your network of people in the industry, that'll go a long way."

To help her stay on top of changes in postal regulations, Balsamo subscribes to Mail Magazine, Business Mailers Review and Postal World, just a few of the postal magazines out there. "Without that stuff, I'd be dead in the water," she says.

Larson says that her manager of mailing services is involved in nearby mailing organizations, and whenever regulations change, members of the post office come to the conferences to speak about those changes. With 22 million pieces being mailed annually, that kind of information is essential.

But the imposing size of the mail regulations is counteracted somewhat by the simplified work process that you gain. "We started with 12 people doing just printing," says Vallone. "Today, we have nine people and we're doing printing, mail, purchasing, messengers and volunteer services. We have downsized significantly but increased our efficiency, although I would presume that a good part of that is due to computerizing our offices."

Vallone predicts more changes for the future, specifically the merging of print and mail with information technology services. "They're doing a lot of printing and personalizing letters, and that seems to go hand in hand with [what we're doing]," he says. "You have to always be prepared for what might happen, so I'm learning more about it every time they work with me on a mailing."

"One of the things I'm going to be looking into in the next year or two will be automating incoming mail using encoding desks and sorters," says Balsamo. "We're growing so fast I don't know if it's cheaper to go the technology route or hire more heads. That's something we have to look into."

"We don't like change, but in this business, we better learn to accept it," Vallone says. "I would never have guessed when I started printing that you would have to know how to run a computer to run a press, but it happened."

by W. ERIC MARTIN