Intelligent Postage Management

By Ken Renko, Pitney Bowes Emtex Software

Getting a mail piece from production into a recipient's hands can be a complex, costly and labor-intensive endeavor. Intelligent postal management systems can make the entire process faster, easier, and less costly.

Unlike costly mass media advertising on TV, print, or radio, direct mail is relatively easy, cost-effective, flexible, and can be targeted with amazing precision. However, getting a letter, card, statement, or direct mail piece into a recipient's hands can be rather inefficient and has become increasingly costly.

Manage Your Postage Costs
As postage costs continue to rise—the next hike is slated for May 11, 2009—the incentive to implement systems that help mailers better manage their postage is growing.

Today, print-to-mail operations spend hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars on postage and carrier costs, so even small improvements can yield a big impact. By targeting ways to tighten controls, eliminate waste and remove inefficiencies, mailers can drive these costs down. Let’s look at three key aspects of the mail process that can benefit from improved access to production data and postal automation: tracking and reporting, funds management and security.

Improve Tracking and Reporting
Manual tracking and reporting can be time consuming and error prone. Because of time and resource constraints involved in manually consolidating, balancing, and reporting information, many high-volume mailers are challenged with collecting accurate data about postage usage. Postage information management systems are designed to automate data capture and reporting with improved efficiency, greater detail and better accuracy.

With the ability to consolidate postage data from single or multiple production sites, by batch or individual transaction, defined by various units of time (minute, hour, daily, weekly, monthly, annually or any accounting period), mailers can automatically recognize and resolve discrepancies, generate accurate reports fast and monitor performance against metrics. They can also manage postage funds and produce necessary postal documentation with ease. With postage costs as the largest portion of your mailing budget, significant savings can be achieved when you manage them wisely.

“Just-in-time” Funds Management
For high-volume mailers, having just enough funds in the meters all the time, to keep production running smoothly can be a balancing act. Imagine having the time-saving ability to refill—but never overfill—multiple meters with a single transaction and optimize postage-related management tasks without costly production delays.

Online viewing and management tools provide real-time visibility into the status of postage funds and expenditure information for every mailpiece. With a funds management solution, mailers can more securely manage funds that go into postage meters and track funds that are withdrawn. The fund information is stored in a centralized database for future reference to simplify postage costing, account management and charge-backs. You can even set up thresholds so meters get automatically replenished as needed to maintain optimal cash flow along with “low postage” alerts.

Smart and Secure Postage
In the current business climate, tightening financial controls and accurate reporting are of paramount importance. By automating many of these tasks, you can minimize manual processes, improve accuracy and reduce reconciliation time, thus decreasing the time and cost of audits, the risk of postage inventory loss, and overall costs.

Postage management solutions can also help you ensure compliance with USPS automation requirements, protect against postage fraud, and provide accurate accounting in support of standards and regulations like SAS70 and Sarbanes Oxley. With a postage management system, mail operations can prepare postal documentation and qualify for postage discounts by automating USPS required sortation steps, knowing with certainty that the address, manifest and permit documentation given to the post office are accurate for every mailpiece and correct even for mixed weight mail pieces.

Automate and Save
As postage rates continue to rise, it's important to seize every opportunity to automate, streamline, simplify and reduce costs. In terms of tracking and reporting, funds management and security, implementing Production Intelligence® and postal automation solutions can benefit every aspect of your postage accounting and fund management tasks.

To find out how a smart postage automation and management solutions can help you save money, learn more about Pitney Bowes Production Intelligence^® software solutions by visiting our website at www.pb.com.

Ken Renko is the product marketing manager at Pitney Bowes Emtex Software Questions? Contact him directly with your thoughts and comments at krenko@us.emtex.com.

Ken Renko has been involved with printing systems and output management technology companies for more than 25 years. He joined Pitney Bowes' Emtex Software in 2006 as a Product Marketing Manager in Boca Raton, Florida and is responsible for product management and marketing support for industry-leading enterprise output management solutions including: Virtual Intelligent Presentation (VIP)™, Virtual Document Enhance (VDE)™, FlexServer and P/I Wizard. Before joining Pitney Bowes Emtex Software, Ken held various technical and marketing support positions with Océ Digital Document Systems and the Xerox Printing Systems Group. The combined years of experience in the electronic document industry have provided him with an objective understanding of the requirements and challenges that impact transactional printing, document output management, multi-vendor workflows and variable data applications. He has developed a number of white papers, authored several industry articles and has been a regular presenter at Xplor and On Demand.