Enterprise IMB™ provides a set of solutions for organizations who want to optimize the effectiveness of their mailing operations. Enterprise IMB™ is based on the US Postal Service's Intelligent Mail® Barcode (IMB), and allows organizations to keep up with the USPS regulation changes and achieve unprecedented integration with the USPS automated mail processing systems.
CrawfordTech's Enterprise IMB™ architecture is a modular set of solutions that allows you to integrate these various capabilities within your existing infrastructure to avoid any unnecessary work or replacement of previously built infrastructure. You can choose to start with a basic implementation and stay with it, or over time add incremental components to increase the level of your implementation and benefits with the knowledge that you will have a fully integrated system without making any throw-away investments.
Converting from POSTNET to IMB Basic Service
In order to maintain current USPS discounts, all mailers will need to eventually move from POSTNET and PLANET Code barcodes that most organizations have been using for decades to the new USPS IMB four state barcode. Enterprise IMB™ provides a modular, easy-to-use way to move to the new IMB barcode. Continued low postage rates will repay the cutover costs year after year.
Changing documents from POSTNET to IMB is one of the most daunting aspects of IMB conversions. Enterprise IMB™ can make that task much easier, more cost-effective, less resource-intensive and reduce the timeframe required to complete the project.
The IMB barcode contains enough information to eliminate multiple barcodes, and several other lines printed in the envelope window (service specification, key line, endorsement line) simplifying the addressing of mail. This reduces the amount of clutter on the printed pieces, improving the look and readability of the documents. This also makes it easier to setup applications, and makes it easier to get the addressee's name and address in the window of the envelope.
For an introduction to the Intelligent Mail Barcode, see the IMB Introduction page.
Implementing IMB Full Service
In order to achieve maximum postal discounts, many mailers want to move to the more complex IMB Full Service option. Enterprise IMB™ can make the task far easier, and provide a centralized facility that all applications within the organization can use. This is more reliable, more cost-effective and easier to manage than using separate mailer ids for each department or application.
There are at least four different steps in the transaction document and mail production cycle where IMBs can be added, including Document Composition, Document Re-engineering, Electronic Commingling and Physical Sorting,
and in many shops there are many different software components being used for these processes.
Often these components run on different computer platforms, on different operating systems and in different physical locations. See Document Preparation and Production (DPP) - Four Options For Placing IMB on Mail for more details.
You will need a solution that can add and track IMBs from any of these different components. IMB Full Service requires Unique IDs be generated, tracked and maintained, and not reused within a period of time. See What is the Unique ID? for more information on Unique IDs.
In order to meet these requirements, Enterprise IMB™ is based on a cross-system client server database platform. This centralized tracking facility is the key to successful IMB Full Service implementation. The centralized tracking system can integrate with all your current processes and operations, giving you a single solution to manage IMB Unique Ids created from all of your applications. Enterprise IMB™ provides a set of API's and utilities that can be used to easily interface to many disparate software components. This ensures that Enterprise IMB™ will fit into your current production environment, and allow you to cost-effectively take advantage of the IMB Full Service postage discounts. This will allow you to accelerate your payback from the additional discounts that get triggered.
Mail Tracking
The benefits of Enterprise IMB™ can go significantly beyond just printing the newest barcode on paper and maintaining maximum postal discounts. Enterprise IMB™ can yield far-reaching benefits across the enterprise for an organization that wants to employ the mail tracking facilities it offers. Once the mailings have been moved to the IMB Full Service plan, Enterprise IMB™ can be used to track both outgoing and incoming mail as it moves through the USPS mailing systems, allowing you to know exactly where each mail piece is at any point in time, and when it has been delivered.
Enterprise IMB™ allows your employees to monitor this information in real time, providing intelligence that can be used in a myriad of uses that will pay big dividends to the organization. Here are a few examples of the ways this can be used:
1. The print/mail organization will have the ultimate method of tracking and reporting on their accuracy and efficiency by measuring the time to get documents all the way to your customers.
2. The print/mail organization can be alerted to any mail pieces that do not get into the mail, allowing them to be reprinted and mailed in a timely basis.
3. Using the free USPS OneCode Confirm® service, address changes can be received electronically and distributed to the appropriate organizations to drive database updates, reducing delays in getting future mailings to your customers.
4. Undeliverable mail being returned can be intercepted and you notified electronically driving the appropriate actions far more quickly and efficiently than waiting for the physical mailpiece to be returned.
5. Having "vision" into the mail system allows customer service staff to know when documents have been delivered to your customers, improving their credibility, reducing confusion and allowing workload forecasting to be more accurate.
6. Tracking return documents can allow your organization to more accurately forecast cash flow, reminder notices for unpaid bills and lock box processing workloads.
7. "Proof of delivery" can be obtained without spending large amounts of money on courier shipments.
8. You can achieve much higher accuracy in timing marketing mailings to arrive at their recipients exactly when you need them to be there, allowing marketing campaigns to be more successful, especially when you need to schedule multiple touches such as emails or phone calls.
With Enterprise IMB™, mail tracking can provide a wide range of capabilities and benefits for your organization at a very reasonable cost.
There is no one fits-all IMB solution. Every organization's needs, requirements and existing production processes are unique. IMB is not a point fix; it must be tightly integrated into your production environment.
Ease of Implementation
All transaction document and mail production shops are unique. They all have a different mix of hardware, software and processes. A successful Enterprise IMB™ implementation has to be a collaboration to learn how your organization's unique environment functions and then tailor an Enterprise IMB™ solution to match that environment.
Enterprise IMB™ is a modular set of solutions, each of which has been designed for implementation ease. You can implement Enterprise IMB™ components as you need them, allowing you to progress at your own chosen speed. You will need some effort from your own IT resources but keeping this minimized allows your IT organization to keep focused on their priorities.
Enterprise IMB™ can be implemented without replacing your current processes, preserving your current investments in hardware and software, and keeping migration costs to a minimum.
Since Enterprise IMB™ can be implemented in four Levels, you can implement just what you need now and know that you have a clearly defined path in the future. See Four Levels of IMB Implementation for further details.
We offer Enterprise IMB™, CrawfordTech's family of IMB solutions to integrating IMB into your environment.
Crawford Technologies Can Help with Enterprise IMB™
CrawfordTech can assist you in a successful migration to IMB to achieve all of these benefits using Enterprise IMB™. CrawfordTech Professional Services can help you in designing and developing the necessary enhancements to your production process to generate and add IMBs, track IMBs for their lifetime, track mail pieces through the USPS, and utilize that tracking information wherever you need it.
Summary
To realize all the benefits an Enterprise IMB™ solution offers requires far more than just putting IMBs on a page. It requires a solutions approach that combines internal and external tracking and integration with Mail and Transaction Document Production components, and can provide vision into the USPS systems for your organization in a series of four implementation steps that you can implement according to your needs. Enterprise IMB™ enables your organization to realize all the potential benefits of the USPS IMB program across the entire enterprise.
CrawfordTech offers Enterprise IMB™ - a comprehensive scalable solution to meet your mailing needs: from just adding the IMB to your documents, to providing and managing all unique ids across your enterprise, to capturing all other available data related to your mailings including inbound statistics for use in your other operational applications and many levels in between.
Click now on Implementing Enterprise IMB™ Solutions for more information on how CrawfordTech can assist you in implementing an IMB solution to fit your needs.
Enterprise IMB™ is a trademark of Crawford Technologies Inc.
Intelligent Mail® and OneCode Confirm® are registered trademarks of United States Postal Service.
