Case Study: A large federal agency
About our Customer
“Ricoh brought great ideas and solutions to the table. They have been an integral part of our mail and printing sites’ success as well as helping us achieve significant cost-savings.”
— Government Official, Large Federal Agency
Challenge
Solution
Used sustainable, fast and cost-effective inkjet printers
Created custom intelligent workflow and interface solutions for mailings and returned mail
Utilized USPS processes and data to reduce the overall postage burden and improve production operations
Developed an efficient solution to route return mail either to a secured destruction site or to the agency, saving time and taxpayer money
Ricoh was already managing, servicing and providing maintenance to the agency’s two print and mail facilities, which covered about 99% of all mail. The sites both used Ricoh’s inkjet technology, which is cleaner, more energy efficient and less expensive than toner-based printing. High-speed, roll-fed inkjet systems print the mail pages with speed and accuracy, while the pages themselves are printed in zip code order, ready for the USPS, minimizing postage costs. For all outbound letters, addresses are automatically checked against current USPS standards to prevent delivery failures and can be tracked. The Ricoh team also built a workflow that sorts and puts the mail into trays into a zip code order, which in turn, saves the post office significant time in transit and dramatically reduces the cost.
To overcome their other challenges, the Ricoh team created a custom workflow automation solution by developing an interface with the United States Postal Service (USPS) that provides near real-time delivery status of the constituent notices. Ricoh also managed the 1,000 different types of correspondence notices by getting the print data and, subsequentially, applying address hygiene as part of the workflow — a previously manual and tedious process that would save significant postage and return mail costs.
Another aspect of the workflow automation system included using USPS technology to selectively send returned mail to a USPS secure destruction site with the ability to pick out certain mail that should be delivered back to the agency. The intelligent workflow software allowed the agency to harvest returned mail codes for delivery to other agency business systems to keep their records updated.
Results
