The Joys Of Togetherness

Combining your print and mail operations will bring efficiency and cost savings to your parent organization. Learn from those who have done it.

When you tell customers you provide "one-stop shopping" for all their printing needs, are you including mailing? You should be.

In-plants that oversee both print and mail bring big savings to their parent organizations, both in time and money. To find out more about the benefits, we talked with supervisors of these combined operations. Sharing their insights with IPG were:

• John Barron, Director, Printing and Mailing Services, University of Saint Thomas, St. Paul, Minn.

• Karen Bush , Coordinator of Printing & Mailing, Mount Vernon Nazarene College, Mount Vernon, Ohio

• Jimmy Friend, Director, Print/Copy/Mail Services, University of North Texas, Denton, Texas

• J.R. Gaddis, Director, Printing and Mailing Services, University of Oregon, Eugene, Ore.

• Steven A. Goodman, Manager, Printing and Mail Services, California State University-Fresno

• Bill McCart, Mail Services Manager, University of California-Berkeley

What are the advantages to having mailing and printing in the same department?

John Barron: The design of a mail piece can drastically affect the postage rate at which it can be sent. When the design experts can easily speak to the mailing experts, everyone gets more knowledgeable, and the institution can benefit in hard dollars.

Also, turnaround time is reduced because the facility in which the mail pieces are produced is the same as the facility that processes the mailing.

Sometimes mailing data or addresses come to our bulk mail center in an application like Microsoft Word that requires advanced manipulation to get the fields straight. Our graphic designers in the printing department have the skill to assist the mailing department.

Karen Bush: We can be a one-stop shop. Departments can send us letters through the network to the printer and we are able to print and mail in the same office. We do personalized mailings this way also.

Jimmy Friend: Logistics. High volumes of printed materials are produced for the university that will be processed through our mail operations. It was a nightmare arranging for these large volumes to be trucked across campus and handled again. Our bulk mail operation has been moved to the same building as our printing operations, thus eliminating the need to use several employees and a vehicle to transport materials to the bulk mail area.

J.R. Gaddis: We're able to offer complete one-stop shopping for our customers—projects from their desktop PC/Mac, through printing, directly into the mail distribution stream. We're able to monitor all cost, adhere to mailing regulations and facilitate interaction between the U.S. Postal Service, campus customers, international remailers, FedEx, UPS and intercampus mail delivery.

Steven Goodman: The customer is able to drop off work either in person or via our Web site for their mail piece to be designed, printed, addressed, sorted, trayed and brought to the U.S. Postal Service utilizing our "One Stop Shop" operation.

Bill McCart: Advantages include:

• The ability to offer an integrated printing/mailing service (we call it "Print-to-Post"). In situations where the printer and mailer do not have an internal mandate (i.e. there is competition with outside vendors), this creates a significant competitive advantage that can be used to increase both printing and mailing revenues.

• Mailing jobs can be scheduled in production along with printing jobs, for just-in-time mailing.

• It eliminates the cost and time to package materials and ship them to a separate mailer, which leads to lower overall costs and faster service.

• It eliminates the mailer's production queue (i.e. just-in-time mailing).

• It provides greater staffing flexibility for both the print and mail sides.

• It greatly reduces mail piece design errors that might increase postage costs, or that might run afoul of non-profit mailing rules.

Some of the advantages above are achievable, at least to some degree, for separate printing and mailing operations, but only if they cooperate closely. In the real world, however, the cooperation that's achievable usually falls far short of what's achievable by combining the operations into one.

List ways mail and print departments can work together better?

Barron: Cross train! Managers must make sure employees gain some experience in the other departments. Have the employee make it a written goal to spend at least eight hours in the bulk mail center during Fiscal Year 2001.

Also, celebrate and play together. Have cross-departmental pizza parties, holiday parties and birthday parties.

Bush: It would help mailers if printers understood basic USPS mail design procedures, colors that are not OCR readable, etc.

Friend: Share knowledge of how the printed piece should be created to ensure a project can be processed and discounted without problems. Have the mail operation attend production planning meetings with the customer.

Gaddis: A common vision should guide both units. This will help motivate dedicated employees. Both units should be located within the same facility for better control of production processes and communication between staff. They should both report to the same director. Both should have defined cost centers using chargeback systems, so efficiencies can be monitored.

Goodman: Communicate with each other. Adjust production schedules. The mail center must keep the graphics personnel up to date with postal rules and regulations that will effect the mail piece.

List some productivity-enhancing improvements you've made to your mailing operation:

Barron: We've added address hygiene software, as well as ink-jet addressing equipment and an in-line tabber to our bulk mail center.

We hold open house/pizza lunches for new employees every semester so they can learn more about our capabilities.

We have added one person on a second shift. This person can deal with regular production work, as well as emergency work in the printing/copying area and the bulk mail center.

We encourage customers to use one of the modern standards for their mailing address database software. In the past we had to have many different software titles; now it's down to only a few.

Bush: We have been producing bar coded envelopes for 10 years. The savings to even our small college last year was over $24,000. By having the ability to print mailings in USPS CASS-approved order we are saving tons of time in putting together mailing pieces.

Friend: We moved bulk mail and our recruiting mail operations into the same facility as printing. We acquired addressing and in-line tabbing equipment and budgeted for more money to be used in training mail operations employees. In the past, no funds were allocated for training these employees.

Gaddis: We now make 300 timed stops on campus daily to pick up UPS, FedEx, Parcel Post and U.S. Mail with three full-time drivers to streamline operations and meet all deadlines with the various distribution vendors.

We now use a presort house in another location that offers us improved readability rates on delivery point bar codes. This assures university first class metered mail same day entry into the U.S. Postal mail stream at a discounted rate. It also increases revenue by retaining bigger discounts for our department to help defray operational costs.

We've also been able to negotiate contracts with UPS, FedEx and an international remailer to save our customers money and provide faster service, also using some of the savings to defray costs.

We've installed a new six-station inserter in our bulk mail operation along with a medium folder to facilitate distribution. Every mailing list furnished is run through the latest upgrade of PostalSoft.

Goodman: We print billing bar codes on department envelopes when Printing Services prints their envelopes, which permits the mail clerk to scan the bar code to ensure the correct postage account is billed, eliminating possible data entry mistakes.

We purchased a Multi-Line Optical Character Reader (MLOCR) which permits us to read the address on an outbound envelope and sprays a postnet bar code to allow the Postal Service to process the mail efficiently.

We co-designed and co-wrote a mail program that accepts data from any vendor and our commercial mail management system, permitting us to accurately charge and keep track of departments' mail, UPS and international mailing transactions.

We design and furnish, at no charge to departments, three-color interoffice envelopes. These envelopes were well received. The back side contains the building name, alpha prefix, mail stops and the street address with the unique zip code-plus-four.

McCart: We purchased a Kirk-Rudy tabber to run in-line with a Scitex ink-jet addressing machine, which allows self-mailers to be tabbed and addressed in one process.

We also purchased a mailing table that connects to a folder with a gluing attachment. This is used to create self-mailers. Finished cut sheets go into the folder, are glued closed, then pass the mailing table, which jogs the piece 90 degrees and ink jets the address. Traying/sacking is done as pieces come off the mailing table.

List your future plans to improve your mailing operation:

Barron: I will continue to work with our human resources department to get our mail center employees paid at a level close to what they would earn in the commercial sector. Retaining these key employees (our human capital) is the single most important thing that can be done for improvement in the future.

Bush: In the next couple of years it would be nice to replace our address printer, but for now it works great and is practically worry free.

Friend: We would like to acquire automated equipment that we can use in our recruiting mail operation: variable data printing, addressing, inserting and metering.

Gaddis: We are now buying a new Prism system with the latest technology to ink jet our addresses with multiple, movable heads, wider area placement, better quality and spot color printing.

Goodman: We just ordered a new postage meter, and I requested to be a beta site for Stamp.com to try to eliminate some postage metering, which will expedite our processing time.

Additionally, we will accept additional first class mail from government agencies, which we will automate, eliminating their need to use a mail house. By processing government agencies' mail we reduce the university's postage outlay.

We're also in the process of setting up a multi-campus mail center.

McCart: We plan to:

• Upgrade our stand-alone ink-jetting capacity.

• Mount ink jets on our stitcher to do ink-jet addressing in-line. We're also looking at mounting multiple print heads so we can spray info on order forms and reply envelopes and do personalization.

• Upgrade our inserting machine, possibly with intelligent inserting capabilities.

E-mail The Experts:

John Barron: jpbarron@stthomas.edu

Karen Bush: kbush@mission.mvnc.edu

Jimmy Friend: jimmyf@po.admin.unt.edu

J.R. Gaddis: jrgaddis@oregon.uoregon.edu

Steven Goodman: steve_goodman@csufresno.edu

Bill McCart: mccart@uclink4.berkeley.edu&012;

by Bob Neubauer