Streamowrks Blog
Just finishing up some industry reading and wanted to share this article: 6 Direct Mail Mistakes That Could Cost Thousands. The author mentioned the FSM changes I’ve been talking about along with 5 other common (and costly) design mistakes, but also inadvertently brought up something that is going to become so much more important as we make the last steps in our transition to the Full Service Intelligent Mail barcode. That change is greater visibility (which is good) and concurrently the ability to “catch” errors later in the delivery process (which is potentially not so good).
First, a quick recap: The USPS decided for a myriad of reasons that the now-retired POSTNET barcode needed to be replaced with something a bit meatier. Enter the Intelligent Mail barcode (IMb).
With the new barcode, mailers now have the ability to merge sorting information, optional endorsement line, keycodes, tracking and job information all into one code:
This is great for so many reasons - most notably because the consolidation frees up a lot of space that would have been previously reserved for postal-related “stuff” and because mail tracking has so much potential.
But the possible downsize – the part the author inadvertently refers to in his article - is about catching mistakes… You see, the way the current system works is once your mail has been accepted by the postal clerk at the entry unit, it’s basically gotten an “OK’ to pass through the system. Anything caught further down the line is really only useful for training because it’s not always easy to trace back to the original mail owner.
But with the visibility of the IMb, a destination clerk has all the information that the entry clerk has and errors caught anywhere along the way are now fair game for penalties and up charges after the fact (and long after anything can be done to correct it).
Let me give you an example (this is a fictional example and any likeness to a real project is purely coincidental):
ABC store prints up 6 x 9 self-mailers to highlight their new season’s product line. In the process of cutting and folding, some of the stock ends up with an actual finished size of 6-1/16 x 9 (which is now 1/16 larger than allowable based on new FSM rules). The finished product, ready-to-mail, is delivered to the USPS for injection into the mailstream.
Originally, one of two things would happen at this point:
1) The acceptance clerk would accept the mail “as-is” (likely either not catching that a percentage of the mail is greater than 6″ or not knowing about the change in specs), or
2) The acceptance clerk would catch the error, whereby the mailer now has the option to take the mail back and try to fix it or enter it at non-auto, nonmachinable rates.
Now, with IMb, there is a third potential outcome:
3) The mail gets accepted “as-is” and entered into the mail system. Somewhere down the line, a USPS employee catches the height discrepancy and applies the non-auto, nonmachinable rates on the back-end. The mailer’s only option now is to pay the penalty.
The easy solution to this is to always make sure your mail complies with USPS specifications. If you don’t have a postal guru on hand, you can borrow one of ours.
As for all those “gray” areas, it is important to realize that anything less than compliant or questionable can come back to haunt – and once your mail is in the mail stream there are no take-backs.
