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Automate Your Mailing Workflows
Do Something! Action #3:Automate Your Mailing Workflows
This is one of the five actions of the BCC Software Do Something! initiative.
Action 3/5
Learn about the initiative and each of the five actions here
In today’s environment, it’s not optional to automate workflows. Manual efforts, backlogs, bottlenecks and overtime result from manual and disparate processes and experienced staff leaving your operation.
Presorting can often take hours to perform, especially as sortation schemes are getting more complex. There simply is not enough time in the day to grow your business unless you automate your mailing workflows. Modernize your mailing workflows using rules-based processes and software.
You don’t have to be an expert to take advantage of automation! Automate as much or as little as you want, focusing on repetitive or manual steps and key problem areas with the highest payoff first. Every automation you make reduces the chance for errors and speeds up your workflow.
Automating your mailing workflows provides benefits ranging from improving efficiency and accelerating job throughput to cost savings, improved quality, and reduced risk.
Let’s look at three approaches to mail workflow automation using good, better, and best actions.
Scripts are a Good Way to Start Automating Processes
Adding an automated script to your normal presort workflows is a good way to get started with automation. This is especially true for repetitive mailings and can also aid in improved quality control.
With BCC’s Mail Manager TaskMasterTM option you can record individual tasks or whole jobs, and set them to playback anytime, day or night, with little or no operator attention. TaskMaster is included as a standard feature in BCC Mail Manager Full Service™, BCC Software’s premier solution for top-tier mailers.
We also offer other solutions with scripting such as Postal Web® and DAT-MAIL™.
A Better Approach to Automating Mail Workflows
A step above scripting is creating a hot folder that will automatically run predefined scripts for unattended processing. This is a great way to create a process that is automated from data through delivery.
Solutions our customers use in the “better” category include BCC Mail Manager Full Service’s Job Manager and TaskMaster.
Solutions that can operate by simply having a file appear in a location can further streamline automation processes. This type of automation allows you to queue jobs to be ready to process when the manufacturing floor is opened. This prevents lag from user-triggered automations and allows your computer to do all the work before you’ve had your first cup of coffee. And, because this process removes many touches, it reduces the chance of errors and strengthens the integrity of your mail preparation processes.
Automating Data Processing is One of The Best Approaches:
Take your automated mailing workflow to the ultimate level by implementing a visual data workflow solution like BCC Software’s Ignite. With Ignite’s intuitive drag and drop interface, it expedites the learning curve of data quality and mail preparation and creates an extensible platform to support multichannel marketing opportunities. Many Ignite users also share that Ignite can help attract and retain key talent for their business due to its accessibility.
If your business creates its own software workflows, automating with API solutions may be the right way for you to Do Something! Both Ignite and one of its companion products, BCC Architect, can be accessed directly from other software as part of their integrations –providing you with maximum value based on how BCC’s products can best fit into your workflows. BCC Ignite can be fully configured to run your mailing workflows from address quality to tracking your mail piece delivery, and everything in between, leaving you in a truly hands off environment for those fully configured workflows.
Let's Do Something! Together
Talk with a BCC Software expert about how your organization can automate your mailing workflows to adapt to the changing postal industry.
Let’s discuss your current state and develop an action plan that will put you ahead of the postal changes.
It’s time to Do Something! to proactively address strategic postal changes and make every mailpiece count!