Mail Processing Services

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) services more than 200 billion pieces of mail annually. In the fall of 2001, high volume mail processing companies —many of them TAWPI members—were rocked by the news that mail had been intentionally contaminated with anthrax. This attack closed numerous postal facilities, panicked many remittance handling shops, and led to sweeping changes in many organizations.

The US Postal service, Centers for Disease Control and many industry leaders came together to institute a number of safety precautions and to launch education campaigns. Working with these organizations, TAWPI launched an education campaign on mail processing that brought this critical information to our members.

Review of Mail Processing safety Precautions (LINK TO:)

Mail Processing - Paper Handling and Sorting

Traditionally, a company’s mail room will receive and sort mail into categories and departments based on the address on the envelope, or based on the content. Depending on the specific work process, checks, invoices and other financial transaction documents may be extracted and batched for entry before being sent to other departments.

Individual envelopes with contents destined for specific departments are then dropped into departmental bags or bins, and passed to an internal mail delivery system to be dropped at the appropriate department. The ability to identify the contents of an envelope before it is opened allows prioritization of the items at a very early stage. Use of post office boxes, zip plus-four Postnet barcodes, colors or special printing on return envelopes, and other mail features facilitate the identification of mail pieces.

Mail Processing - Types of Mail

Particularly in a remittance/payments environment, mail processing is generally categorized into three primary mail types.

White Mail - This type of mail is characterized by the use of varying or non-standard sized envelopes that may contain a remittance advice and/or payments and other non-remittance mail. This is the slowest type of mail to open/extract with throughput rates of 250 to 300 items per hour.

Low-Speed Mail - Typically, this type of mail contains something in addition to – or instead of – a single standard size remittance advice and a check. The throughput rates of this type of process range from 400 to 800 items per hour depending on the type and mix of mail.

High-Speed Mail - This type of mail is typically composed of a standardized window courtesy return envelope containing a single remittance advice and a check. The throughput rates of this type of process can be in the range of 8,000 to 10,000 items per hour.

Mail Processing - The “Digital Mailroom”

Recently the term “digital mailroom” has graduated from being a marketing phrase to a term of significant relevance to the information capture industry. The term refers to an organization’s ability to capture mail from many sources (digital, paper, internal, external) and route it electronically to the intended recipient. When properly executed, digital mailroom services can eliminate many hours of wasted time by ensuring that information is routed to the correct party, eliminating redundancies or junk. The process requires collaboration between various information systems – scanning devices, e-mail systems, workflow systems, storage and retrieval. These systems are of particular interest to highly regulated industries and publicly traded companies requiring better management of their information resources.

Mail Processing Services

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