Articles of Interest 

Informative Postal industry Articles www.windowbook.com/Learning 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Window Book, Inc. 300 Franklin Street 

Cambridge, MA 02139 617‐395‐4500 

PostalSpecialist@WindowBook.com www.WindowBook.com 

 

 

 

 

 

Updated December 2015 

 

 

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©2015 Window Book,  Inc.   All  rights  reserved.   Reproduction  in whole or  in part without permission  is 

prohibited.  The information contained herein is subject to change without notice.  Contact Window Book 

for current information.  DAT‐MAIL and eRound Stamp are trademarks of Window Book, Inc.  The following 

trademarks are owned by the United States Postal Service:  CASS Certified, Delivery Confirmation, DMM, 

Express Mail, FAST, First‐Class Mail, Intelligent Mail, IMb, LACSLink, MAC, MAC Gold, NCOALink, PAVE, PLANET 

Code, POSTNET, PostalOne!, Post Office, Postal  Service, RIBBS, Priority Mail,  Standard Mail, U.S. Postal 

Service, United States Postal Service, USPS, ZIP Code, and ZIP + 4.  Mail.dat, Mail.XML and IDEAlliance are 

trademarks of the International Digital Enterprise Alliance.  All other trademarks are held by their respective 

owner or manufacturer. 

   

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Table of Contents

Automating PostalOne!® eDoc. How Much is Enough? .............................................................. 4

Turning your Shipping Department into a Profit Center ................................................................ 7

What is the Cloud............................................................................................................................ 9

Undocumented Pieces – Prepare to Deal with Them Now ........................................................... 11

Latest Software Removes Extra Work Associated with Full-Service Intelligent Mail® ............. 13

Making Changes to Mail.dat Files ................................................................................................ 15

Are You Working Harder or Smarter? .......................................................................................... 17

Simplifying Your Interaction with PostalOne!® .......................................................................... 19

Past, Present and Future ................................................................................................................ 19

Put Your Mask on First ................................................................................................................. 21

Quality Not Quantity..................................................................................................................... 23

Presort and Post-Presort Software: Use Both to Optimize Your Mailings .................................. 25

 

 

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Automating PostalOne!® eDoc. How Much is Enough?

Mailers spend varying amounts of time presenting eDoc to PostalOne!®. Smaller mailers who process “just-in-time” presorts using actual piece weights and attributes rarely need to make changes to their Mail.dat® files. For them, most of the labor required to do eDoc is uploading the Mail.dat files to PostalOne! and retrieving the postage statements that are created on the PostalOne! dashboard. Both of these functions can be automated quite easily and inexpensively with commercially available software from Window Book. A lot of mailers have much bigger challenges. They presort long before mail production so they don’t really know how much the piece will truly weigh until later. In fact, they often don’t even know when the pieces will actually be mailed. Some mailers also have problems estimating piece thickness accurately enough to avoid having to create overflow trays when they under-estimate thickness or produce too many trays when they over-estimate. And still other mailers need to make adjustments to their eDoc to account for shortages and spoilage, customer “pulls”, mailings that are not completed in one day (partial mailings) and a host of other scenarios that ordinarily require manual Mail.dat editing. Then there are mailers who have much more complicated workflows that involve two or more phases. For example, some mailers need to merge their small Mail.dat files for each version of a job to present a single Mail.dat file for that job that will create a single consolidated statement. This is commonly demanded by both BMEU and DMU mail clerks that don’t want to separately verify each individual job version. This workflow involves merging multiple Mail.dat files before presenting the merged file to PostalOne!. “OCI Tray Based Copal” is another example of a two-stage workflow where Mail.dat files from different jobs are merged in a specific way prior to performing palletization across these jobs. The original files are presented to PostalOne! for payment, and the merged file is presented to account for the pallets that were added later. Both of these two-stage workflows can be very labor intensive and any error requires you to re-do the second part of the workflow. Interaction with a logistics provider can also complicate the mailer’s workflow. Mailers need to send Mail.dat files for estimates or orders. Those without the ability to do their own optimization must also get updated files from their logistics companies and submit those to PostalOne! instead of their original Mail.dat files. How much of these more complicated workflows can be automated - and at what cost? Most Mail.dat automation tools focus on processes that are done immediately after the Mail.dat file is imported. Lots of time-consuming processes can, indeed, be automated at this point: adding or removing pallets, entry point optimization, sending an original Mail.dat file to PostalOne! to facilitate partial mailings later on, report printing and tag and placard printing are typical functions automated at import time. For those “just-in-time” mailers that don’t need to make changes to weights or mailing dates or perform any other changes, they can go ahead and create the ready-to-pay release for PostalOne!. Mailers that presort well in advance of the mailing date may need to make changes in piece weight or thickness, add sibling containers, change mailing dates, select only specific containers for mailing that day, merge files or perform a host of processes on a merged file. Prior to now, Mail.dat automation tools were virtually powerless to help them with these tasks.

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Window Book is changing all of that. Ultimately, what prevents the process from being totally automated is the lack of data about these changes in a form that a Mail.dat program can consume because the best place to get most of that data is out on the production floor via scan events. Window Book’s first experience with using production floor data to automate a manual process was when it interfaced with the Whittier Tagger. The Tagger can produce “sibling” tray tags when piece thicknesses are under-estimated and provide the data that DAT-MAIL™, Window Book’s industry-leading post presort solution, can use to add the new sibling trays to the appropriate Mail.dat files. And only DAT-MAIL’s Tagger interface is “lights out”. This interface can also be used to merge trays together when piece weights are over-estimated. If tray tags are printed by the Tagger as trays are produced, DAT-MAIL can actually mark the trays “ready-to-pay” as the tags are printed. Currently Window Book is finishing up its ability to automate a large number of tasks that take place after a manual edit such as changing a piece weight or merging files. It is on our roadmap to even automate those functions using information coming from the production floor. Eventually, our goal is to make it possible to do the entire eDoc process end-to-end without having someone touch a Mail.dat file. In terms of post-mailing automation, being able to automatically submit Mail.dat files to PostalOne! can be done by Window Book’s eDM10X product. This product can give you e-mail or text notification of PostalOne! events such as validation failures or postage statement finalization so mailers don’t have to keep checking the MDR Client to see if their statements are up on the dashboard. Speaking of Statements, eDM10X users can also use Window Book’s PostalWeb to automate the transfer of PostalOne! documents such as UPD Statements and Confirmation forms or Finalized Statements. Next on deck: automated distribution of finalized statements and XML postage data to mail owners, although a mailer’s Customer Service Rep will have the option of approving the statements distributed. Those postage XML files represent the final postage paid through PostalOne! and can be used to electronically and automatically update many systems that require this information and currently get updated manually.

The first thing you, as a mailer, need to do is really understand how many man hours is used in the eDoc process from the time the Mail.dat file is generated to the time postage is finalized and all postage-related documents are distributed and postage information is updated to other systems.

These tasks include, but are not limited to (deep breath here): Mail.dat import, Mail.dat editing, running other Mail.dat-driven processes such as reports, entry optimization, file merges, generating original files and ready to pay updates for PostalOne!, uploading files to PostalOne!, checking to be sure these submissions were successful, and accessing the PostalOne! dashboard to find and download UPD and FIN statements. Besides requiring a lot of man hours to do all these things, some of these tasks are not that simple and require a fair amount of training. How many people in your organization can do them if the primary person responsible goes on vacation or decides to leave? The simplification of these processes that automation can provide makes it much easier to have more people cover what tasks remain. There is more than just productivity at stake.

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What we have been finding is that it really does not matter whether you are a small mailer that presorts “just in time” and have few needs – or – if you are a very large mailer that presorts far in advance and expends large numbers of man-hours submitting accurate Mail.dat files to PostalOne! and your logistics providers. In both cases the return on investment for automating as much as possible is enormous.

The complexity of what needs to be automated only defines how easy or hard it will be. In either case it will pay off handsomely in terms of cost savings, faster end-to-end processing times, and a more reliable and accurate eDoc process. For mail service providers this can also translate into better customer service especially when clients are able to use the resulting data to better automate their own processes!

Automate PostalOne! Statement Retrieval with PostalWeb

Receive your barcoded PostalOne! Confirmation Pages (aka scan sheets)

Download Unpaid (UPD) and Finalized Postage Statements

Integrate postage data into your financial reporting (XML)

Update the USPS MDR (MDX) Client - set and forget the updates

Quickly fix PostalOne! validation errors in your Mail.dat® files

And much more... Our first client saves over $750/week with this automation. Go to www.postalweb.net to learn more - or call 1-800-524-0380. You can also send us an email at PostalSpecialist@windowbook.com.

   

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Turning your Shipping Department into a Profit Center

With the acceptance of cloud based applications by corporate America, technologies that had previously cost well into six figures are now more affordable than ever. The following three areas are among the easiest to implement for immediate returns using cloud based technology: Carrier Rating through Optimization: Contrary to the early years of basic manifesting, modern TMS (Traffic Management Systems) are now capable of not only rating "like" carriers and services, but also cross carrier rating. By having the ability to rate shop based on previously unavailable data, shippers can now compare small parcel carriers to LTL and courier services. Accessorial charges by carriers are now a key factor in this area of proactive rating. Some additional variables that are now used in these types of analysis are package dimensions – DIM Weight. There are now 200+ surcharges that are employed by UPS® and FedEx®. Eliminating these surcharges by having them in the rating schema can reduce shipping charges as much as 30%. Based on this, services from the United States Post Office® such as Regional Box and Cubic are becoming more prevalent. In addition to competitive rates, many times these Postal programs include packing material at no extra expense to the shipper which in itself can make the difference between the shipping department being a cost or a profit center. Post Shipment Auditing: Because of the availability of industry API's (Application Programmers interface) these new surcharges are now being addressed from a refund standpoint. Many TMS now utilize the cloud to audit freight bills immediately as well as file for mis-invoiced activity. Some of these activities include "manifested but not shipped" and extended area and residential surcharges that can be incorrectly applied. On average it is not uncommon to see refunds ranging from 4%-6% off the total UPS and/or FedEx annual freight expenditure. Another recent advancement of the new generation of TMS are dashboards. These easy to use intuitive tools allow for organized retrieval and reporting for more intelligent future shipping decisions. Customer service departments can now route based on shipping profiles that are created from this analytical data. SaaS Payment Options: Long gone are the days of costly hardware investments to house and maintain "on-premise" Traffic Management Technology. So too are gone the costly investment and time consuming tasks of IT personnel to administer these solutions. State of the art hosting facilities now offer shippers more security and data integrity than ever before. Amazon, Hewlett Packard and IBM are just a few of the big names getting involved this brave new world. The cost of hosting has never been more affordable. As important as this data is, the size of the information needed for rating, routing, execution and analytics is relatively small. It is not uncommon for hosting services to cost in the range of $500 to $1,000 per month complete with fault tolerance and redundant back up safeguards. This expenditure pales in comparison to costly IT staffs and constant hardware and software “upgrades.” The most compelling aspect when evaluating applications available in the cloud as opposed to On-premise solutions is the paradigm shift away from licensing software and costly annual

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maintenance agreements. The new transactional model is based on companies buying transactions based on projected and actual usage of the system. This alone can save shippers roughly 18% of the total purchase price of traditional on-premise TMS. DAT-SHIP as the new best of breed TMS: Window Book has brought to market a hosted cloud based solution with operational cost containment in mind. Based on the transactional pricing model, the Window Book DAT-SHIP TMS offers industry low price per transactions which saves shippers even more money because of blocks of up-front purchased transactions regardless of the carriers used. For pennies a transaction, DAT-SHIP will rate, process and track UPS, FedEx, DHL and USPS as well as optimize against LTL and regional courier services with NO ADDITIONAL COST for adding domestic workstations and locations – TRUE cost containment. This enterprise class of TMS was built with the Supply Chain in mind. Window Book offers automated small parcel auditing on a gain-share basis whereby the customer pays only when there are refunds or credits after the refunds or credits are actually received. There is no effort necessary on the part of the customer. Once again, these savings are on average 4%-6% of the total UPS and FedEx annual expenditure.

With added discount and markup capabilities, shipping charges can be passed on and still save the recipient of the shipment (consignee) money on their overall order. With the above cost cutting technology, the shipper can turn their department into a profit center.

Learn more about DAT-SHIP Request a FREE Shipping Optimization Analysis today!

Call us at 1-617-395-4585 or visit windowbook.com/ShippingProfitsDec for more information.

   

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What is the Cloud

Besides being the platform that makes services like Netflix and Facebook possible, the cloud is - in simple terms - little more than a big group of computers. The “little more” part that makes those computers into a “cloud” is specialized management software. This software allows ten, a thousand or hundreds of thousands of computers to function more or less as if they were just one (much bigger) computer. If you want a computer with the power of 10 computers, the cloud can do that. If you want a computer with the power of 150,000 computers, the cloud can do that too. The exciting part is that the cloud gets users out of the business of managing hardware that takes time to setup, rooms to house, power to run, power to cool and people to manage, and replaces them with a service-oriented setup. Your accountant will be all googly-eyed when they talk about taking all those fixed assets (the computers, rooms, cooling etc.) and converting them into variable expenses than can be purchased as they’re needed and disposed of when users are done with them. Here’s how that works: Before the cloud: If you need 10 of those computers today and 100 tomorrow and 10 the day after that, you still need 100 computers and the room, power, cooling and people to run them. After the cloud: You pay for 10 computers on day 1, 100 on day 2 and 10 on day 3.

In other words, the cloud commoditizes computers and the work to manage them. When products and services your business consumes become a commodity, it’s worth study to see if they should be outsourced. When you’re dealing with a commodity, it often makes sense to: Make buying decisions (almost) solely based on price, all else being equal.

Outsource things that you don’t do well, don’t specialize in or that don’t change from business to business.

Outsource valued services if you can get a service level agreement that reflects that service’s importance.

It’s easy to see why computers (or “compute power”) can be commoditized, while customer service should never be. Doesn’t outsourcing threaten my staff? With all this talk of outsourcing and commoditization, you might be wondering about the impact on your job or that of your staff. Rather than threatening them, I think they’re more likely to improve their jobs.

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When “Big Co” lays off 20,000 people, you have to wonder what those people were doing that was so low in value that the company could afford to get rid of all them at once. When those same people are producing and improving what the customer needs, they perform higher value jobs that require industry experience. I believe a failed cloud-based project is less likely to affect jobs compared to the same project using traditional deployment methods. Why? The latter requires lead time to get hardware, software and people ready - and those project-specific costs are unlikely to be retained if the project fails, if the project gets started at all. Can you think of a project that never got off the ground because you couldn’t get the infrastructure? The cloud solves that economic problem, enabling you and your staff to do more. Which business are you in? Other than regulatory changes, our customers tell us three things concern them most: No one wants to be disrupted by updates. Yet updates are inevitable because of bug fixes (no software is perfect), new features and the ever-present USPS regulatory and workflow changes. Everyone wants the best performance possible. Despite the dislike of updates, everyone needs their results more quickly but without losing quality. In some cases, there are times when you need substantially improved performance and have no way to get that without extensive hardware updates. When you buy computers, you’re stuck with them for years due to tax legislation, accounting requirements and/or cash flow. No one wants to worry about backups, disaster recovery etc. Even so, the risk of business-ending disruption is substantial from theft, weather and routine hardware failure. Managing these technical challenges in an industry where regulatory changes can happen with little notice is difficult. We understand the pressure you’re under. That’s why we’re building DAT-MAIL Cloud. We take on the headaches that take your staff’s focus away from your customers and

your business.

We manage updates, backups and system management responsibilities that aren’t part of your core business.

You choose the performance level. If you need better performance, you can get it without re-installation, capital budget approvals, hiring, months-long delays and unknown deployment costs.

While that might sound like a sales pitch, it’s really more like a recruiting poster: We’re looking for a few customers to join us in leading the industry to the next level of mailing systems technology with proven cloud and mailing technologies: Amazon Web Services and Window Book DAT-MAIL.  

   

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Undocumented Pieces – Prepare to Deal with Them Now

As the USPS® prepares to resume its rollout of Seamless Acceptance, mailers are starting to wonder what they are going to do about all those undocumented pieces they see on their Mailer Scorecard. It’s no secret that in the future the USPS wishes to assess penalties for these pieces - possibly without even being subject to a threshold limit. For many mailers the assessment for undocumented pieces could be the most expensive assessment they face. Unlike some of the other assessments, which could be passed onto the actual mail owner, this assessment will probably come right out of the mailer’s pocket. Like it or not, Seamless Acceptance is in your future, and keeping undocumented piece counts low will be a big challenge for many.

Note: Seamless Acceptance can, indeed, actually make life a lot easier for you as long as you comply with the rules!

The USPS wants every single mail piece to be uniquely barcoded and identified in the eDoc, even if the mail is not Full-Service. For Seamless mailers, an undocumented piece is one that has been mailed with a barcode that the USPS cannot find in the mailer’s eDoc. For a mail piece barcode to end up in the eDoc it usually has to be presorted with presort software or run through an MLOCR. However, many mailers have small jobs - usually Single Piece rate First-Class mail - that have IMbs and are normally run through a postage meter, but not processed for presort discounts through presort software or an MLOCR. By definition all these pieces will be “undocumented” since no eDoc was provided. There are many other possible causes of undocumented pieces - this example just happens to describe the most prevalent cause. It would be a good idea to start identifying why you are seeing undocumented pieces and plan to eliminate them or provide the USPS with the information required to successfully challenge an assessment. Mailers can start by running these small jobs through presort software and start generating and submitting eDoc. Keep in mind there was a DMM change in June 2014 that allows mailers who use eDoc to pay for postage to pay for as little as one mail piece with their permit. This would allow many mailers to stop metering these jobs, which should reduce production costs enough to offset the additional presort step. A note of caution here: there is only so much you can do to avoid undocumented pieces on your scorecard because sometimes you really have done everything right, but for some unexplainable reason the USPS can’t locate the barcodes in your uploaded eDoc. Unfortunately, when this happens the burden is on you to prove these mail pieces have been paid for.

One of Window Book’s clients recently told us that they have documented operational savings of over $50,000 per year just by moving from meter payment to permit payment for small jobs created by one client! Let us help YOU save money and improve productivity by incorporating small single piece rate mailings into your presort and eDoc process. Call us at 800-524-0380 or email PostalSpecialist@windowbook.com.

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You should be able to download the barcodes of your undocumented pieces. If you have too many, you can subscribe to receiving this data on a regular basis. What you want to do is determine if you mailed these barcodes, and if so, when. You will want to supply the USPS with the submission date, Job ID and either the file name or the “historical header sequence number” of the Mail.dat® file that contained this barcode. You will also want to supply the USPS with the Postage Statement ID(s) generated by PostalOne!® for that submission. If you think this kind of research is easier said than done, you are right. The good news is that Window Book is already working on solutions to help you with this. DAT-MAIL™ clients can research when individual IMb barcodes were mailed using a new query screen. Based on mailer feedback we are looking at doing much, much more to help you - not only with undocumented piece problems, but also with other scorecard issues. As the USPS adds presort verifications to the scorecard, they will represent another potential liability that could cost mailers the presort discounts on pieces out of compliance. DAT-MAIL already has a Labeling List validation feature that will tell you when the wrong Labeling List was used in your presort so you can avoid such problems.

Window Book is looking at a number of other new ways we can help both DAT-MAIL users and those that don’t use DAT-MAIL with other scorecard problems as well. If you are interested in helping us plan for the future, please let us know! Call us at 800-524-0380 or email PostalSpecialist@windowbook.com. Our priorities are set by what our clients ask us for - so now is the time to start problem-solving together!  

   

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Latest Software Removes Extra Work Associated with Full-Service Intelligent Mail®

 

Back in late 2013 when the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) ruled that the proposed Full-Service mandate constituted a rate increase of about 4%, this was based on the extra work most mailers had to do to comply with the requirements. This was not far off in terms of what costs smaller and mid-size mailers were facing at that time. In the six years since Full-Service Intelligent Mail® was introduced, software vendors continue to make it easier to comply with Full-Service requirements. Most presort programs can now automatically assign unique piece, tray and container barcode numbers. Most will make it easy to store and use by/for information required in most Mail.dat® files. As a result, most mailers need to do very little additional work to presort and print a Full Service job. The extra work comes next: post-presort editing and interacting with PostalOne! ® Some mailers will need to make changes to their Mail.dat files, and in the past you had to wait for jobs to be imported into a post-presort product - then have to know something about Mail.dat to make your changes. Then you had to validate and upload the Mail.dat files to PostalOne!, make sure the files were successfully processed, and then retrieve documents from the PostalOne! dashboard to have your mail accepted. After your mail was accepted you would have to go back to the PostalOne! dashboard and download the finalized statements for your accounting department or your clients.

This can be a lot of extra work and it may require expertise your company does not have in abundance. Thankfully Window Book software has been reducing the amount of labor required to make post-presort changes to Mail.dat files and interact with PostalOne!.

To simplify post-presort Mail.dat changes, Window Book has released its Advanced Workflow Automation Manager™ (AWAM) for its DAT-MAIL post-presort editing software. It can hunt down new Mail.dat files on your network and quickly import them on your server. DAT-MAIL’s “Navigator” and “advanced Navigator” user interface allow users to make the most common changes without any knowledge of the Mail.dat specification. Window Book also has two offerings which together can completely automate a mailer’s interaction with PostalOne!. Both can be used by any mailer that submits Mail.dat whether they have a post-presort editor (DAT-MAIL) or not. eDM10X™ automates file uploads to PostalOne! and can provide e-mail and mobile phone text message notifications of each PostalOne! event. No more having to look at the MDR Client dashboard to see if your Mail.dat files made it! PostalWeb™ is a mobile friendly web site that allows eDM10x users to automatically receive their PostalOne! documents via e-mail or secure file download right to their network. No more searching or downloading postage statements or confirmation pages! Mailers can also subscribe to receiving XML files with all of the postage information that was in their PostalOne! statements for accounting or jobshop/business management systems. The result of all of this automation is not just a time and cost savings, but it makes opens these job functions to less skilled and less expensive employees.

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Some mailers are now using this automation to take one more step: improve operational efficiency to the point where it actually costs LESS to handle a Full-Service mailing than it did before Full-Service. For example, some eDM10X users create e-mail notifications for their Detached Mail Units of new statements in PostalOne!. When a mail clerk gets one of these e-mails, they begin the verification process. Another e-mail signals the mailer’s logistics department to load their trailers when a statement is finalized. Automating these hand-offs saves time and money. Simpler, more reliable business processes often have a value that transcends their hard-dollar savings. Window Book is quickly transforming Full-Service Intelligent Mail from a cost center to a cost-savings center. As adoption of these innovations increases, the extra cost of Full-Service will drop making it easier for the USPS® to impose its mandate.

Reduce labor intensive work of interacting with PostalOne! by requesting Your FREE Personalized Demonstration of

eDM10X and PostalWeb

Call 800-524-0380 or email PostalSpecialist@windowbook.com

   

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Making Changes to Mail.dat Files

This is the first of a series of articles which will provide mailers with insight into techniques to manipulate Mail.dat® files to better represent the mailings presented the U.S. Postal Service®. What is described can be performed with commercial post-presort editing products. Readers will need to have some familiarity with the basics of the Mail.dat file specification. Merging Mail.dat files This article describes why a mailer would merge multiple Mail.dat files to create a single Mail.dat file. Post-presort editing programs have this capability and provide different options to control the content of the merged files. Why Merge Mail.dat files? There are four common reasons mailers will merge Mail.dat files:

Your USPS® Acceptance Clerk wants to do fewer verifications of mail with the similar characteristics and get fewer postage statements

You want to palletize multiple versions of a job together (Copal). Each version initially has its own Mail.dat file.

Copalletize mail from multiple jobs (DMU required) using tray-based OCI Copal Consolidate data from multiple jobs for reporting or analytical purposes

There are things you should know about how different merge options will impact verification and how your eDocs will look to the USPS. You must never, ever send any of the Mail.dat files you are going to merge to PostalOne!® individually. If so, these jobs have to be canceled before you submit the merged file. Segmentation A segment record in Mail.dat can represent a different version of a mail piece, a different production run and/or a different presort qualification. Most Mail.dat files that describe a single version have a single segment. When you merge them together you can create a Mail.dat file with either a single or multiple segments. If your merged file has multiple segments each representing a segment in the original Mail.dat files), PostalOne! will create separate qualification reports for each but a single consolidated statement. This can reduce the amount of time it takes a mail clerk to verify jobs with multiple versions. If your merged file has only one segment, the USPS will see it as a single job with one qualification report and statement. You should discuss this with your mail clerks because the presort will look odd. You may have multiple trays that ordinarily would appear as a single tray in a single presort. All traces of the original presort qualifications on the original jobs will be gone and replaced by single qualification report that reflects the combination of the original jobs but after trays are created. Copalletization If you are producing multiple versions of the same job and have the ability to place the resulting tray on the same set of pallets, you can palletize the trays after the Mail.dat files are merged and present the mailing as a single job. This is not the same thing as tray based OCI copal described next, but you can have these pallets verified at Business Mail Entry Unit (BMEU) or a Detached Mail Unit (DMU). Besides the difficulty of producing the trays and combining them onto the same set of pallets, you must be careful that none of the versions is only partially mailed. If the job cannot be mailed in its entirety when the other versions are mailed, you must split out the

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mailed and unmailed portions into separate Mail.dat files then include only the mailed portion in your merge file. Tray Based OCI Copalletization (Internal) It is possible to copalletize the mail from multiple jobs and typically the merge process is used to make this possible. To do this, you must have a Detached Mail Unit (DMU) verifying your mail and you must be approved by the USPS to do this. This is a two step workflow. The first step involves submitting Mail.dat files to PostalOne! for payment as each job is produced. You would not have pallet records in these Mail.dat files and each tray must have the “Included in Other Docs” field set to the value “I” (letter I). Later when you know exactly which jobs were mailed that day, you will merge the files together but the merge program must create or populate an “Original Container Information” (OCI) file in Mail.dat which creates a cross reference between the trays and their original Job ID’s and the trays in this special Mail.dat file. This file would be palletized, placards printed and submitted to PostalOne!. Each of the trays in the original job must be paid for in PostalOne! though payment does not have to be finalized at this point. The timing on this is important because you have to know with 100% certainty which jobs are mailing that day early enough to do your merge so you can palletize and print placards. Consolidating Data for Reporting Purposes If you have report that report on the content of a single Mail.dat file, the merge program will allow those reports to reflect the content of multiple mail.dat files. The merging would take place after the original files have been paid for in PostalOne! and the merged files would never be uploaded to PostalOne!. They would just be used for reporting and analytics.

If you like to learn more about making changes to Mail.dat files or about PostalOne! eDocs in general, visit www.windowbook.com/MOA to sign up for a FREE Mailing analysis to see how DAT-MAIL, Window Book’s post-presort software, can help you. If you’re interested in more information on the latest trends in the postal industry subscribe to our monthly eNewsletter at http://www.windowbook.com/Learning

 

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Are You Working Harder or Smarter?

If you’re submitting electronic files to PostalOne!® for just the Full-Service mailings you process, chances are you’re working a lot harder than you really need to be. Oh, you say, “but sending files to PostalOne! is a lot more work than submitting hard copies.” On the surface, that may appear to be the case, especially if you do not do electronic submissions very often. The fact is, though, if you have two different process flows, one for Full-Service mailings and one for everything else, you ARE working harder than necessary. And, who wants to work harder than they need to? Any workflow is easier if all the jobs are processed in the same manner, and submitting jobs to PostalOne! is no exception. But only Full-Service requires eDoc We often hear from mailers who say that they only use electronic documentation (eDoc) for Full-Service mailings, and that they use hard copy for everything else because eDoc is not required. At first blush, that may make sense, but the reality is that going back and forth between eDoc and hard copy is actually what is creating the extra work. As long as you have a Mail.dat® file for a mailing, there is no reason why you should not be submitting eDoc, simply because it is far easier to process all your jobs in the same way, as opposed to using one workflow for some, and a different workflow for others. The more consistent you make your workflows, the more chance to have to start automating steps in your process. That automation is what helps you work smarter not harder. How do I move to one workflow? It’s a good idea to start by documenting the process you currently use to submit your eDoc. Then document your hard copy submission process, and compare the steps between the two. Pinpoint areas in your eDoc process that tend to cause issues or take more time; then work on eliminating the hurdles. The best way to do that is to practice sending those hard copy jobs electronically using the Test Environment for Mailers (TEM). The more you practice, the easier you will find the process to be, and the more likely you are to quickly identify problem areas and make the necessary corrections. As you go through this practicing and error correcting, modify your workflow documentation to reflect what you learn. When you start feeling more comfortable using eDoc, start transitioning your traditional hard copy jobs to the new electronic workflow, and set a goal of transitioning all of them within a reasonable period. How do I automate my workflow? The best place to start looking at automation is at the source of your eDoc: the Mail.dat file. It makes sense to put as much valid data as possible into your Mail.dat files coming out of the presort process, so there is less editing and manipulation to perform on these files after the fact. The cleaner and more accurate your Mail.dat files are right out of the gate, the better chance you have at automating subsequent processing steps. Once you have your Mail.dat files whipped into shape, identify the various types of processing steps needed for the mailings that you produce:

Are there common edits that need to be made to the files? Are there additional processing steps needed, such as palletizing, creating courtesy

pallets, analyzing for drop shipments, merging for co-palletization, etc.? Once you have identified the necessary processing steps for the various types of mailings you do, start investigating the automation tools available in your mailing software. Are there steps that can be performed at the same time the Mail.dat files are being imported into the software?

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For example, there may be certain jobs for which very few, if any, edits or processes are needed – and if you’re using the right post-presort software - these can likely be set up to automatically generate postage statements and create the export file needed to upload to PostalOne! as soon as you import the file into the software! Likewise, if there are standard processes that need to take place, such as changing the mailing dates or palletizing the loose trays, those can also be set up to be done automatically as the files are imported into the software. Additionally, you may be able to set up custom workflow configurations that will automatically launch all the steps needed for specific workflows, simply by dropping the Mail.dat files into specified “hot folders.” Start out small We are all human, so our natural tendency is to resist things that are new and unfamiliar. Standardizing and automating your workflow processes is no different; we tend to be most comfortable doing the same tasks in the same manner that we are familiar with. However, the way you process your mailings today may not be the most effective or efficient way, and making some changes is the only way that you can make any improvements. It truly does not need to be an intimidating process. You can start out with some very basic standardization and automation steps and then build on that once it becomes second nature and comfortable. Can someone help me? At this point, you may be thinking “this all sounds good, but I’m no technical guru. How am I supposed to get all of this put into place?” Not everyone is a computer expert, and certainly getting the mail out the door is your top priority, which means that you need to take advantage of your available resources. Find someone in your organization who is more computer savvy, and ask them to help you look for tasks that could be automated. Tap into the technical resources of your mailing software providers; chances are they have numerous resources to help guide you or even perform some of these automation configuration steps for you. Join area mailing organizations, such as your local Postal Customer Council (PCC) and network with other mailers to see how they are tackling their workflow automation issues.

The Automation Circle

Window Book makes these moves toward standardization and automation much easier with the numerous automation tools we offer, such as eDM10X™ to automate your PostalOne! transmissions, PostalWeb® to automate your PostalOne! document downloads, with DAT-MAIL™ post-presort editing software, and the newest tool in the automation arsenal: Advanced Workflow Automation Manager™ (AWAM™). All of these work in great harmony to bring the entire mailing process into an end-to-end automated workflow, but don’t let all these acronyms scare you: start with the basics and add more automation tools at your own pace. We can even help you analyze your current workflow and make suggestions on how to improve your efficiency and profitability. Call us at 800-524-0380 or email PostalSpecialist@windowbook.com for more information on our automation tools.

 

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Simplifying Your Interaction with PostalOne!® Past, Present and Future

Window Book has been working hard to make it easier for mailers to use post-presort software to provide accurate eDocs to PostalOne!®. The quest to make this process faster, easier and more automated will continue until most mailers can perform these functions as a “lights out” process without direct human interaction with our products. Our vision is to make this economical for even small mailers in the near future. Earlier this year, Window Book released its Advanced Workflow Automation Manager

(AWAM™) for DAT-MAIL that allowed mailers to automate more Mail.dat import related tasks than ever before possible. Window Book’s eDM10X® takes the human interaction out of eDocs submission to PostalOne! and provides automated notifications of important PostalOne! events to help mailers streamline their production and acceptance processes. PostalWeb® automates retrieval of PostalOne! documents which can even be viewed right inside of DAT-MAIL thanks to its new PostalWeb Connect feature.

Learn more about eDM10X

Visit https://www.windowbook.com/eDM to sign up for a “FREE PostalOne! Automation Analysis” to see

how eDMPlus can help you

These innovations have enormously reduced the time it takes to make changes to Mail.dat information, provide it to PostalOne! and then obtain resulting documents.

Not all mailers understand how this huge increase in productivity can be leveraged to save money and improve customer service. We will continue to educate clients and prospects alike on these topics. If you are not familiar with the specific capabilities we now have, please look at our web site, our March Newsletter (http://fastmedia.windowbook.com/docs/News/March-2015-eNews-Updated.pdf). Window Book is working hard to reach our goal of “lights out” eDocs. It may not be possible to eliminate all human interaction with a post-presort software right away since when most Mail.dat files are imported, the information about what happened in production is not known. Production has not happened yet. Human interaction with the data is often needed. Window Book has been simplifying that human interaction with that data so that less training is needed and that interaction takes a lot less time. That simplification will accelerate in coming months. Window Book’s Advanced Navigator(s) interfaces have allowed most mailers to make changes in their mail.dat files with little or no knowledge of the Mail.dat file specification. Our Advanced Navigator interface is receiving a major revision this month. You will be able to configure the screen to include buttons for just the tasks you frequently perform and arrange them in the order they are performed. We are working on other projects for later in the year to further simplify the way you would pay postage in PostalOne! and see the results. If you are

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interested in being part of a user focus group to provide feedback on these projects, please send an e-mail to: postalspecialist@windowbook.com The next wave of AWAM improvements will help mailers automate all of the steps they must perform after they manually change data in their Mail.dat file or perform a manual function like a file merge. Many mailers stand to save as much time with these enhancements then they did automating processes during mail.dat import. Window Book is also helping more mailers automated processes outside of its products that require postage or job information. DAT-MAIL just went through a major enhancement that allows you to automatically export XML files with the data you need to do estimates or work tickets in several commercial jobshop management programs. PostalWeb can deliver to you an XML file with your final postage data right from PostalOne! so nobody has to type that information in anymore. In 2017 we will be working on enhancements and products that will bring “lights out processing” to many more mailers and further reduce the time all mailers have to spend dealing with eDocs and other USPS programs. Stay tuned for more news as we roll out these innovations that will save you increasing amounts of time and money, even as the USPS continues to raise the bar on what you must do. The mailing industry is following the same path that most American manufacturers have been following for some time. Those that survive and prosper have improved their operational efficiency and customer service, mostly through automation. Those that fail to do this either exit the business or get taken over by those that have become more efficient and effective in how they do business. Window Book wants to become part of your success story!

Learn more about PostalWeb

Visit www.windowbook.com/MOA to sign up for a FREE Mailing analysis to see how PostalWeb can help you.

   

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Put Your Mask on First

Professional development mentors remind us that we must take care of ourselves first. They advise that we improve ourselves mentally, physically and emotionally - in other words, attend first to our overall health - so that we’re better prepared to perform well in our roles at work, at home and in our community. Personal finance mentors do the same when they remind us to pay ourselves first. If we don’t, something will always come up that consumes those funds, leaving us ill-prepared for our future. Airline flight attendants ask us to put on our oxygen mask first, then help others sitting near us, because we can’t help our kids or significant others if we’re unable to breathe. Here’s a technology management guy’s version of “putting YOUR mask on first”: Backup your business data.

Test your backups regularly to be sure you can restore them.

Rotate your backup media off-site so that a theft or on-site fire or water damage don’t render your backups useless at the time you’ll need them most.

Document your backup and restore process so that you can restore systems quickly even though your technology wizard is on a 16 hour flight to Australia.

Investigate, plan and implement real-time disaster recovery for your business data, particularly if your business model has little downtime tolerance.

This may seem like a bother. It may seem like overhead you don’t need. Don’t be tempted by those thoughts. Fact is, if you put YOUR mask on first, you’ll be in a better position to help your customers solve their problems, grow their business and keep paying you. Why? Because your business will be more resilient. Look back at the business impacts from events like Hurricanes Sandy or Katrina; If you were impacted by those storms, how would you service customers who weren’t in the storm track? If you can’t get their mail out, you know they’re likely to find someone else who can. If that’s you, your business is not resilient. These kinds of things happen when your business can’t take a power outage, a hard drive crash or similar disruptions. The question is… when? No one can point to a date and declare (in their Darth Vader voice) that “Your systems are going to fail on this day.” What I can guarantee, even without considering Katrina, Sandy, Boardwalk fires, blizzards and ice storms, is that it’ll happen. Someday. These things happen to electronic, mechanical devices. You can either be prepared for them or not. At least once a week, I hear from someone whose “Someday” has arrived. Three times in October I saw it happen to businesses who didn’t have backups. Like a TV show involving the Kardashians, it just isn’t necessary. You might think that hardware failures happen more often to businesses that don’t have backups. The reality is that businesses with good backups simply restore them and keep working, so we don’t hear much about their hardware problems. Like dentists and politicians, we tend to ignore backups until we need them. Unfortunately, this puts your job, your business and your clients’ business at risk. That puts the security of your clients, your employees, your clients’ employees and the families of all these people at risk.

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Consider this: If your most important (mailing or otherwise) database disappeared right now, how would that impact your business? How would you recover? How long would it take to get back to where you are right now, productivity-wise? When did you last test your ability to restore your data from a backup? If you don’t know the answers, ask your technology people. Just explain that you’re concerned about the possibility of hardware failure and natural disasters, so you’d like to know what the backup and recovery plan is and how long it will take to recover. These are things management should know. While there is no good time for this to happen, our friend Murphy (the law guy) would suggest that failures for mailers are likely during the holiday season, or during financial month / quarter/ yearend. The good news is that if you have your backup and restore act together, you might lose some time and productivity when your Someday comes, but you’re far less likely to lose your job or your business.    

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Quality Not Quantity

Two of Window Book’s eight Core Values directly involve quality: We practice continuous improvement. We are committed to quality in everything we do.

It’s easy to say this, so we thought you’d like to know what we do to demonstrate our commitment to these values. Source Control In order to manage the thousands of program files, USPS® data and other programming resources that comprise Window Book’s suite of products and services, we use a technology called “Source Control.” “Source Control” keeps a history of each programming resource including who created it, who changed it and when it changed. If we need to go back to an older version of a file, we can easily do so. This system acts as a highly-sophisticated backup resource that helps us avoid “lost” code and conflicts between changes made by multiple people. Continuous Integration Continuous Integration describes the process of automatically and constantly integrating programming and data changes into your production environment. Our build system monitors our Source Control system looking for changes to programming (source code) and raw USPS data. When a change is detected, all affected components are automatically rebuilt. Contrast that to a manual system, where these rebuilds wouldn’t happen right away and might be forgotten. For example, we receive USPS transactional data describing changes to the APO/FPO/DPO list. Rather than manage these changes by hand, we manage them by having the transactional file saved into our Source Control system, which triggers the build system to generate the SQL syntax to modify the APO / FPO / DPO database our products use. The update is automatically pulled into our installers. Installation automation An easy place to overlook quality is the assembly of software components into a product installer. An installer places a program on a client’s computer, bringing all the pieces of a vendor’s product together so that the product is ready to use. Most software vendors introduce consistency by using an installation creation tool. Despite that, the process of pulling all the pieces together into the right folders, with the right components remains complex because of all the “moving parts” that are involved. Our automated build systems perform an identical set of steps each time ensuring our installers are built consistently. This process cut our build time by 2/3rds, increased installer/build consistency and eliminated a time-consuming manual process. Software Testing Different testing methods are used to test software in different ways and at different stages of development. Unit testing validates that a single piece (often called a “method”) of an individual program produces the expected results, even as the environment and other components change. Integration testing is similar to unit testing and occurs between two or more systems that work

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together, such as testing the import/export or program interfaces between Window Book DAT-MAIL and Postal Package Partner, or testing the ability of Window Book’s DAT-MAIL to process barcode scans from a Whittier Tagger. Regression testing confirms proper behavior of a program from the end user perspective. System testing pulls all the pieces together, testing from end to end with a user’s workflow and other systems. Automated regression testing We have an in-house team that builds automated tests for new, existing and changed functionality, which tests changes coming out of development. Automated systems currently test 8700+ different points in DAT-MAIL, including each click and keystroke needed to install DAT-MAIL, import/export a Mail.dat®, produce reports, and enter, generate and alter statements. We also use an automated regression testing service that tests over 25,000 different points in each DAT-MAIL release we produce on each Windows version we support. Manual regression testing Manual regression testing is performed by experienced staff who know postal workflow as well as our products. These staffers test common workflow steps and verify calculations on each new version of our products with the current PostalOne!® MDR client and online system. We also test our products’ ability to work properly with each new version of the MDR client released by the USPS. This includes customized functions that some clients have purchased. Summary: As stated in our core beliefs, Window Book practices continuous improvement and is committed to quality in everything we do. We will continue to demonstrate this commitment through the use of automated and manual testing.    

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Presort and Post-Presort Software: Use Both to Optimize Your Mailings

In today’s mailing world, it is more critical than ever for mailers and mail service providers to be able to communicate with the Postal Service™ electronically. While some mailers are encouraged to use the PostalOne!® system, a growing number of mailers are required to use PostalOne! to submit all of their mailing documents electronically (eDoc). eDoc is required for Intelligent Mail® Full-Service, USPS® incentive promotions and programs like MailAnywhere. Some local postal districts are refusing to accept paper postage statements and require mailers to either submit eDoc or manually enter their statement data using PostalOne!’s Postage Statement Wizard. Create accurate postal documentation In order for mailers to take full advantage of the PostalOne! system and generate accurate mailing documentation, they need to use both presort and post-presort software. Presort (or “pre-sort”) software focuses on the mailing list maintenance, address verification, address quality, and mail sortation. A key output file from the presort step (other than the name-and-address file, of course) is the Mail.dat® file. Post-presort software specializes in managing and manipulating/editing the Mail.dat data and automating the process of transmitting the data and required documentation to PostalOne! Manage Mail.dat files The PostalOne! system requires you to be able to edit your Mail.dat files in order to achieve accuracy before submitting finalized versions. By using post-presort software in conjunction with the presort software, mailers can easily meet the USPS PostalOne! requirements. Presort software produces the “original” file a mailer can submit, and then post-presort software can edit and generate updated Mail.dat (and Mail.XML™) data for intermediate and final submissions. In editing the Mail.dat files, mailers can also benefit in a number of other ways. They can avoid paying for spoilage or mailpieces that did not get mailed (a/k/a “shortage”), generate postal documentation to reflect what they actually mailed and share mailing and postage data in an industry-standard format with partner companies in the mailing supply chain.   

Retain and gain new customers In order to keep pace with the everyday challenges of today’s mailing world, corporate mailers and mail service providers must take advantage of the benefits afforded by post-presort software in conjunction with their regular presort software. To be considered amongst the best in the industry, stay ahead of competitors and acquire new business, mail production facilities must be able to handle everything, from small, simple mailings to complex, large-volume mailings with tight deadlines by incorporating very powerful post-presort software into their operations. Post-presort software is an essential tool in making a smooth transition to eDoc and the Intelligent Mail Full-Service option where you can improve accuracy and efficiency, automate operational procedures, reduce compliance costs, reduce labor costs, save money on postage, and be more profitable. Use both presort and post-presort software to increase your efficiency and productivity - save time and money, and optimize your mailings!

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Free eDoc and Mailing Optimization Analysis 

Sign up for a FREE Mailing analysis to see how DAT-MAIL, Window Book’s post-presort software, can help you.

Learn more about making changes to Mail.dat files or about PostalOne! eDocs.

Visit www.windowbook.com/MOA

In order to optimize your mailing operation and stay abreast of changes in mailing requirements, it is essential to use both presort and post-presort software. By using post-presort software you will be able to:

Easily edit and generate updated Mail.dat® and Mail.XML™ data

Build your postal documentation to reflect what you actually mailed vs. building your mailing to your initial planned documentation

Avoid paying for spoilage or mailpieces that did not get mailed

Generate and manage Intelligent Mail Barcode (IMb) for trays and pallets

Process partial mailings and co-palletization efficiently

Reduce the cost of mailing by analyzing entry points for drop-ship discounts

Automatically get updated labeling lists and drop-ship data for the date of mailing

Share mailing and postage data in an industry-standard format with partner companies in the mailing supply chain (transportation companies, mail owners, mail agents and the Postal Service™).