Urban Renewal, One Bill At A Time - In-plant Impressions

By Chris Bauer

Working for a municipality facing a projected budget deficit of $2 billion can be a scary proposition. But for Gary McElvaney, mail center manager at the City of Philadelphia’s Mail Processing Center, it has presented an opportunity to help get his employer back in the black. The mail processing center’s 13 employees provide folding, perfing, inserting and mailing services. A separate city agency handles printing of approximately 30,000 water bills per day, as well as other city billing, which is then finished at the mail processing center. All told, the in-plant cranks out 6 million municipal water bills and about 15 million pieces annually.

McElvaney relies on a pair of GBR folders—a CAS 52 and CAS 38—to handle the city’s heavy workload. The CAS 38 was added in 2008, retiring an eight-year-old GBR machine that folded more than 60 million pieces in its time at the shop.

The in-plant first acquired the GBR folders because of the automated settings they offer, McElvaney recalls. The shop’s previous folders required a lot of manual effort.

“The operators I had at the time were retiring, and it seemed to be best to go with an automated system,” McElvaney notes. “It really made the transition easy, because once they were trained on the GBRs, we could program the jobs and basically let the machine do the rest.”

McElvaney notes that the shop perforates every bill it processes, saving the city money by avoiding purchasing pre-perfed paper. Paper is acquired using a low-bid city contract. The in-plant also has cut down on overtime and utilizes a sorter to get a discount from the post office. McElvaney reports that there are preliminary plans to move the printing facility to the mailing center.

“We send the bills out, so we are generating money,” McElvaney contends. “And we do pretty well saving the city money.”

The new GBR folder has allowed the shop to work at higher speeds and eliminate costly conversion time. What may have taken up to 45 minutes in the past can now be done in less than five minutes, the manager contends.

“Our water bills are a weird size: 7¾x10½,? McElvaney concludes. “But we also do jobs that are 8½x11? and 8½x14?, so we have to jump around a lot.”