The issue of compliance and integrity has become a key topic for service providers who touch and manage sensitive customer data, whether that of their own or their clients’ customers. The increased demand for quality and audit-proof process control often does not translate into capital budget increases, making it even more important to analyze investments made in quality or process improvement.
In the case of production mail integrity, discriminating between true compliance and false security is most important, as credibility, hard-dollar fines and loss of business are at stake. The question is: which solution truly validates total integrity?
The most common approach is scanning finished envelopes for a sequence number. This is a “false security” solution, since the rest of the content of the envelope is unknown; it must be assumed that the operator loaded the correct material (inserts, return envelopes, etc), and that the inserter correctly assembled the pieces.
Most intelligent inserters will be able to disqualify and outsort any piece that does not contain the proper sheet count. For a non-integrated, bolt-on output scanning system, this will cause the inserter to stop unnecessarily. There is then some form of operator intervention (read “opportunity for error”), a drop in productivity and a false alarm that can eventually numb the operator to the point of reflexively pushing “start” or turning off the camera in order to get the job out on time.
Another option is combining bolt-on input scanning with bolt-on output scanning in an attempt to perform an “input-to-output” match. However, in the event of any subsequent machine stoppage or jam, there is absolutely no way of knowing if an operator has manually (and incorrectly) repaired a damaged piece. And, in the event the machine erroneously combines collations, it is still up to the operator to take corrective action when (and if) the output scanner catches the error. Is the error in the piece that caused the stop, the piece now already on the output stacker, or the piece before? The recovery process now requires the operator to touch all three pieces to verify them, increasing opportunity for error before proceeding.
Additionally, if scanning systems are not networked and validating mail pieces in real time, what assurances are there that a piece (or the entire job) was not duplicated and being run on another machine? Essentially, what are total operating costs associated with staffing, maintaining, and operating slow, aging inserters, and are they really worth the investment to ultimately gain only a false sense of security?
Pitney Bowes pioneered the technology of high-integrity production mail processing. The company’s Direct Connect (DC) was designed to intelligently track and monitor mail piece assembly at the sheet level, actively measuring speed, location and skew of every piece of material in process to ensure each is assembled as expected.
For example, the instant a sheet is fed, DC predicts to the millisecond exactly when that sheet should make it to the next photocell. Based on size and expected speed, it predicts how long it should block that photocell before exiting to the next stage. This sheet-level predictive tracking is performed for every piece as it is fed, accumulated, folded, processed at each insert station through the insertion engine and down the output section, until the piece exits the machine. In effect, DC determines the status of every mail piece from the inside of the envelope out. The status of that mail piece than can be determined by external inspection: the sequence number is as expected, the contents are as expected and collation size is as expected.
In a networked file audit or file based control environment, DC inserters compare material being processed against what is expected via an input file which fully defines the mail run. DC inserters are able to share knowledge about which pieces are being processed in real time to instantly identify duplicate jobs or mail pieces within a job so that action can be taken immediately. Operators can be presented with up-to-date insert plan specifications to help ensure proper loading—settings such as insert weights, machine mode, charge back account ID, and meter settings can be automated further reducing setup time and error.
Before any investment is made trying to upgrade older inserter machines, a total cost-of-ownership and cost-per-mail piece analysis should be made to determine whether or not it makes sense to invest upwards of $50,000 per machine for a partial solution, or wholesale replacement of two or three older machines for a single, high performance inserter.
No vendor can guarantee 100 percent integrity, as there are too many factors beyond control. However, it can be guaranteed that any integrity solution that does not actively predict and track material motion, or that causes excessive false outsorts leading to human intervention and unnecessary reprocessing, can only decrease the overall level of piece, job and process integrity.
By Peter D’Amato
Peter D’Amato is Director, Product Management for Pitney Bowes Document Messaging Technologies. He can be reached at peter.damato@pb.com.
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