Simplifying Mail for Your Customers

According to Mailing Systems Technology magazine's annual Wage and Operations Survey that was published late last year, there is a difference in the degree of preparedness, depending on the type of business and the kind of mail they produce.

Since the time of the survey more mailers have taken the plunge and are working on IMB projects, but there are still operations who have not fully considered the impact that the features of full-service IMB can have across their entire organization.

According to the MST survey, 63% of mailers say they will implement IMB. But breaking down the responses by business types reveals that a large majority of companies who mail for a living - the service bureaus, presort vendors, and lettershops, as well as those companies who describe themselves as "printers" are on board with IMB.

Only half as many mail centers serving other business categories such as manufacturing, transactional document printers, education, and government had an IMB plan in late 2008.

There is a big gap between First Class and Standard Mail producers as well. 83% of Standard mailers say they are implementing IMB, but only 51% of First Class mailers.

This tells me that the benefits of full-service IMB may not be obvious to organizations with in-house mail operations, or the value of the benefits don't justify the investment necessary to participate in the full-service program.

It's probably a little of both. But I've spoken to some mailers who have seemed to have ineffectively communicated the impact that IMB could have on internal business units. The implementation decisions seem to have been made only within the document processing or IT departments. Other departments were not consulted.

This is probably a mistake. The tracking functionality available with full service is probably of most value to internal business units. Those units may not be the same as those that typically send work to the document center, but their business processes are highly dependent upon those documents. If mail center management hasn't approached all the departments affected by the documents it mails out, the organization may be missing out on an opportunity to use intelligent mail to improve service or lower costs.

Print/Mail Consultants routinely works with a variety of entities that are affected directly or indirectly with the documents of the corporation. Facilitating discussions about IMB in order to establish the value of various functions to individual departments is a service we offer our clients.