OPEX Cuts Mailroom Costs with 4-state Barcode
OPEX Cuts Mailroom Costs with 4-state Barcode
March 8, 2007: OPEX Corporation has announced its mail extraction and scanning unit, the AS3690i now reads Australia’s 4-State Barcode while scanning documents and envelopes.
Tony Cartwright, General Manager of GBC Australia, OPEX’s APAC distributor says, “During talks with potential customers, almost without fail, they asked if the AS3690i can scan the 4-state barcode.”
This capability allows the user to capture mailing and customer information contained in the customer-defined portion of the 4-State Barcode. Previously this could only be achieved with a hand-held barcode wand. The new application allows barcode information to be captured on the fly as the document is scanned.
On the extraction side, it automates the extraction of an envelope’s contents and its scanning, helping resolve a problem many businesses have with return-to-sender mail. Cartwright says it also eliminates the need for transaction separators, staple removal, and reduces the demand for pre-scanning document preparation. Much of this work is done manually by many organisations.
The strategy Cartwright has proposed to one customer for the AS3690i’s use is to extract and scan correctly addressed mail for morning production spikes, then extract and process return-to-senders in the evening.
Cartwright says that the pages per minute indicator omits the significantly larger cost of document preparation for scanning, which stands at 70% of the total. The AS3690i reduces this.
“If you prepare a normal scanner with 10 envelopes, you need to create piles, separators and batch header sheets. This system generates its own virtual batch header sheet automatically.”
The return to sender (RTS) problem
Since the 4-state barcode contains vital sender and receiver information, it is the trigger for mail automation. The problem for large-scale mailrooms used in insurance, banking, healthcare and government sectors is that the RTS sticker is often placed over the barcode. Mail needs to be opened to access the barcode before it can be processed and fed back into the contact database for correction – again vital for database cleansing. On top of this, RTS letters sting the budget on the way out and the way in.
Cartwright says, “If you’re trying to minimize RTS mail, you need to capture the right information. The best way to do this is through the barcode. If it hasn’t been obscured, you just drop the envelope in and scan through the window face. No one else has a system whereby you can read the 4-state barcode this way which reduces the cost of handling RTS mail.”