21 Grams - Multi postal vendor management

TRANSACTIONAL BULK MAIL
Almost every second letter sent in the UK is a transactional
mail piece, be it an invoice, bank statement or a payroll notice.
These letters are typically produced by larger business or billing systems creating print ready formats for high volume printing.
The challenge, even with electronic sorting and optimisation
of transactional mail, is that address data is often only available within complex document and file types making access complex and technically challenging. In addition transactional mail is time-sensitive,
making manually intervention prior to printing impractical.

iSORT
iSort is a postage optimisation service that minimises the customer’s postage costs by calculating the best possible combination of vendors and products available
for any specific mailing.
By dynamically selecting the lowest cost combination of delivery options and operator iSort optimises every mail item every time resulting in significant savings.
Every mailing is treated as unique and calculates the best combination of products and vendors for the mailer, based on their prices and discounts every time. The mailing is optimised prior to printing either in-house or at the chosen 3rd party print provider.
In a deregulated postal market, with many competing postal operators, keeping track of different postage rates, discount systems and the terms and conditions attached to these can be an exceedingly complex task for the customer. iSort minimises the customers’ postage costs by optimising the allocation of mail between different postal operators.
iSort includes the following functionality:
• Address Extraction. The iSort software extracts the address data from any printfile (e g AFP, txt, XML)
• Mail merging/consolidation. Small mailings are consolidated into larger bulk mailings in order to take advantage of postage discounts offered by postal operators.
• Multi vendor optimisation. The system, which uses a sophisticated optimisation algorithm, maintains up-to-date data on the postage and discount structures for postal operators, as well as their geographical coverage and data on their distribution timetables.

The introduction of Downstream Access (DSA), Pricing In Proportion (PiP) and full deregulation in January 2006, has changed the UK mail market forever.
New entrants and products are competing with Royal Mail and each other leading to greater innovation and price sensitivity in the market, all of which provide exciting new opportunities for the smart mailer.
In essence there are four categories of delivery option available for larger mailers in the UK today:
• Cleanmail, Walksort & Mailsort (120, 700 and 1400, CBC and OCR), through Royal Mail Retail.
• National Downstream Access through DSA operators such as UK Mail, TNT Lynx, and DHL.
• Zonal Downstream Access through DSA operators like Citipost and Target Express.
• End To End networks of hand delivery networks like DX and Citipost.
Until today the decision has been a straight choice between a National DSA operator or a Royal Mail mailsort
service.
With the introduction of Zonal pricing and new alternative
end to end networks, this is no longer the best possible solution for a mailer.