Keeping Tabs On the Mail
SOMETIMES ACCIDENTS help you discover a new use for an old machine.
Ron Lindgren, manager of Quality Impressions—the in-plant for Avada Hearing Care, in Beaver Dam, Wis.—says his in-plant once ended up with a half-million misprinted envelopes because the wrong original was chosen before printing.
To fix the foul-up, the shop designed and printed custom labels, then used its Secap Jet 1 Tabber to position those labels and recover the envelopes.
“Without that machine, 500,000 envelopes would have had to be trashed,” he reveals.
That's not to say the 18-month-old Jet 1 Tabber isn't useful under normal circumstances, too. "It applies bulk rate postage stamps on mail pieces, along with personalized, repositionable notes with fonts that look hand-written," says Lindgren. "The mail piece looks hand-written and has a live stamp," something that his customers were requesting.
Recently the in-plant has been mailing 80,000 pieces, in addition to supplying fifteen regions (and more than 200 offices) nationwide with business cards, direct mail and forms. To manage orders for regular items like business cards, Lindgren uses Pageflex from Persona. "We have four different shells for the different divisions of Avada," he says. "Employees type in their info and proof it themselves, so we see it only after they've given their okay."
Everything used to go through one person in each region, says Lindgren, "but now everyone has their own email address and account." Employee orders are cleared by a supervisor in each region to help track an office's budget. The shop, which has five full-time employees and an operating budget of $380,000 in 3,500 square feet, has also set up Pageflex for use with simple mail merge documents. Lindgren aims to add more customizability in the future so that employees can change images and further personalize mail.
From a volume of 3.5 million impressions in 2006, Lindgren expects to get close to six million this year. To handle the increased volume, the shop recently purchased a video jet addresser. Ninety percent of that work is "easy posts," to use Avada's term. "They can be anything from a self-mailer and postcards to four cards inserted in an envelope," he says. "It's called 'easy' because it's easy for them..."
