Let’s talk about Architect REACH. What has the team been working on?
Architect REACH is our new cloud solution.
It brings APIs—API-based postal processing—to customers, but does so in a hosted environment.
The other nice thing is that REACH includes CASS processing, so if you want to send your records through for presorting, we can CASS certify them at the same time.
It’s like a few other solutions, with more automation. And being in the cloud gives it a lot of additional benefits.
The steps and results are essentially the same; it’s just a matter of how much of it is automated and where you are processing it. Are you doing it all locally on your servers, or are you doing it through REACH and it’s being processed in the cloud?
So depending on what your needs are, you could have a solution that’s on-prem or hosted.
What do you feel are the main benefits of using a cloud solution like this?
There are a few. It depends on what your priorities are, but what we hear is that by having this solution in the cloud, it’s going to free up a lot of IT resources.
Customers don’t want to have to load monthly directories and babysit that process—install monthly updates, biweekly software updates, babysit servers, making sure it’s available at all times.
Now it just all automatically happens in the cloud. There’s nothing for them to ever have to update.
Plus, not only are you managing your mailing solutions, but you’ve also got Windows considerations, like trying to keep up and maintain your version of Windows, updating security patches, being concerned with spyware and malware—all the security considerations that one needs to take on to support on-prem solutions. You don’t have to consider that as much, at least for the REACH product.
Another big one is the pricing model.
It’s a fixed cost. So you know how much it will be for a certain amount of mailings. And you can purchase credits at a volume that works for you.
Some of the smaller mailers like this because they don’t have to spend a lot on new software upfront. This is by the credit, so you can scale it up as you go.
Overall, we hear that the fixed cost is attractive—not only fixed cost for the actual jobs but also for hardware and IT costs, for the reasons I said before.
When would REACH not be a good fit?
There are a few reasons.
If you need to have your software on-prem, for compliance or high-security reasons; if everything has to be on-premise and absolutely nothing can leave their facility—then an on-prem solution like BCC Architect would be better.
Also, one of the biggest requirements behind REACH is that you’ve got a staff that can support it. Since it’s an API, there’s no interface. So you have to build your workflow—your process—through Architect REACH for CASS and NCOA. You need to have somebody that has experience with RESTful APIs to be efficient with this.
There are tools out there that you could use to step through the process, but you need somebody that understands working with APIs. So that’s where this is probably a better fit for larger companies that have an engineering department or some kind of development team in-house. Those kinds of technical requirements would get reviewed in early conversations with a customer.
Once you have the platform built out, what does using it look like?
Basically, you create the job with your job parameters—you define things like the class of mail, piece type, sorting schemes—all the details that are going to be used to drive your presorting.
Then, once you upload your data, REACH takes care of the presorting.
It adds everything you need, like the Intelligent Mail Barcode and presort sequence numbers, and returns all the records back to you, which you can then use in your workflow.
It also gives you all the supporting postal documentation in a zip file, so everything’s ready to go for your production team for finishing up the mailing. What that next step of the workflow looks like is up to you.
If you’re a mailer, you could create a portal; a lot of portals exist where customers can upload data. And then on the back end, you connect REACH into the portal, and the customer can log in and see everything: here’s my data file, here’s my mail class, here’s my piece type, my postage. Bounce the file they uploaded through REACH to get the postage statement and your postal docs and the return data—all within relative real-time processing.
There are a lot of integrations available for Data Services, Track N Trace, or NCOALink.
We have a SOAP API that you can use on what we call our INFUSE platform, which would give you access to all the data enrichment solutions that BCC Software has.
So we’ve got access to a lot of data enrichment tools through a SOAP API that is all hosted on our side, and you don’t have to worry about loading updates or directories. It’s just you giving your records, and here’s your results. And then you can continue on with your workflow.
What are some other exciting opportunities with REACH?
There are a few that are maybe not secondary but added bonuses to REACH.
A discussion that I had just this week was about using the INFUSE platform. They could do kind of a pre-flight of the data—take the records from their customer’s print stream, scrape the name and address, upload it, and then provide back some near-real-time results on something like, “Here are the records that have moved,” and then they can determine if they want to mail to the original address or to the moved address, for example.
It’s all on how you want to consume and present the data back that INFUSE and REACH give you.
Do you have any closing remarks before we end our conversation?
I think we’ve covered a lot, but here’s what I’d like to leave the readers with: ask us questions.
Come to us and help us understand your needs, your problems, and any goals you might have. We’ll walk you through all the solutions we offer—whether it’s on-premise, hosted, or outsourcing to a third-party mail services provider.
There are so many options out there, and we’ve worked with pretty much all of them—people shouldn’t feel like they need to make decisions alone.
