How householding is evolving – and how AFP helps
By Ted Dunlop
For years now, print operations have been becoming increasingly automated and increasingly diversified. As a result, in many environments, different steps in the production and delivery process are handled by different software, different departments within a large print operation or enterprise, or both. For these reasons, the need for big-picture transparency and management is greater than ever.
Without established, strong householding procedures, printers can miss out on huge cost- and time-savings. One of my favorite examples is stock confirmations: Every time I buy a stock, my broker sends me an individual letter confirming the transaction, no matter how much buying and selling I did that day. So after particularly active trading days, I might get multiple individual letters, each of which were produced and mailed at the same cost – instead of the much more economical envelope bundling the recent confirms. Similarly, if an enterprise’s billing department has a mail piece, they want to send to me, and so does their marketing department, they will likely mail them out separately. But when this practice is extrapolated out to higher volumes, and they’re sending, say, 200 marketing communications to my zip code and 200 bills to my zip code, they can rack up some serious postal savings by bundling them together and sending them out at the same time, getting high-volume sender discounts.
That’s where AFP comes in.
AFP empowers users to insert a named group, which is sort of like putting a chapter heading around a chapter. It indexes communications and allows them to be grouped by various attributes, including postal codes and recipient names. Named groups can be used to improve visibility throughout and across print environments, granting a quantitative reading on types of communications, common recipients, types of communications and much more. By using named groups to bundle different applications going to the same recipient or same postal code, print providers can take more consistent, effective advantage of postal discounts.
Named groups can also be used to streamline operations. The bill that a long-distance phone service provider sends to a big enterprise is a different kind of document than the one it sends to an individual consumer. By separating these two types of applications into different named groups, the print provider can look at their relative volumes, page counts and finishing needs and schedule hardware usage accordingly, so the big-enterprise bills move seamlessly, as one, from prepress to production through finishing, and the individual bills do the same, in accordance with their different needs. Then, at the end of it all, named groups related to destination zip codes can be used to presort for postal savings. AFP, in conjunction with named groups, can create efficiencies in a variety of ways, and those ways scale very well with higher-volume environments. Maybe my broker could even condense their confirmation letters! First, I’ll have to tell them about AFP…
It is worth noting that not every application natively supports named groups. However, with some creative transforms, you can add named groups and automatically index relatively painlessly. Perhaps the best way to do it is to transform your application to AFP and insert the named groups information from there. AFP is exceedingly well equipped to take advantage of named groups, whether you’re using them to drive postal savings, streamline production or simply grant greater visibility into print operations. Named groups also help archival and retrieval systems. A few other data streams allow for named groups, but none do so as simply and seamlessly as AFP.
For print providers who face increasingly tight turnaround requests and ever-growing pressure to cut costs, simple, seamless streamlining is a huge boon. AFP’s design for high-speed production environments allows it to fit nicely into MIS department strategies, and its inherent tendency toward step-by-step documentation makes it especially well-suited for a role in providing quantitative bird’s-eye views into print operations. If you’re not already using named groups and AFP, consider looking into it – or asking your local AFP expert.
Without established, strong householding procedures, printers can miss out on huge cost- and time-savings. One of my favorite examples is stock confirmations: Every time I buy a stock, my broker sends me an individual letter confirming the transaction, no matter how much buying and selling I did that day. So after particularly active trading days, I might get multiple individual letters, each of which were produced and mailed at the same cost – instead of the much more economical envelope bundling the recent confirms. Similarly, if an enterprise’s billing department has a mail piece, they want to send to me, and so does their marketing department, they will likely mail them out separately. But when this practice is extrapolated out to higher volumes, and they’re sending, say, 200 marketing communications to my zip code and 200 bills to my zip code, they can rack up some serious postal savings by bundling them together and sending them out at the same time, getting high-volume sender discounts.
That’s where AFP comes in.
AFP empowers users to insert a named group, which is sort of like putting a chapter heading around a chapter. It indexes communications and allows them to be grouped by various attributes, including postal codes and recipient names. Named groups can be used to improve visibility throughout and across print environments, granting a quantitative reading on types of communications, common recipients, types of communications and much more. By using named groups to bundle different applications going to the same recipient or same postal code, print providers can take more consistent, effective advantage of postal discounts.
Named groups can also be used to streamline operations. The bill that a long-distance phone service provider sends to a big enterprise is a different kind of document than the one it sends to an individual consumer. By separating these two types of applications into different named groups, the print provider can look at their relative volumes, page counts and finishing needs and schedule hardware usage accordingly, so the big-enterprise bills move seamlessly, as one, from prepress to production through finishing, and the individual bills do the same, in accordance with their different needs. Then, at the end of it all, named groups related to destination zip codes can be used to presort for postal savings. AFP, in conjunction with named groups, can create efficiencies in a variety of ways, and those ways scale very well with higher-volume environments. Maybe my broker could even condense their confirmation letters! First, I’ll have to tell them about AFP…
It is worth noting that not every application natively supports named groups. However, with some creative transforms, you can add named groups and automatically index relatively painlessly. Perhaps the best way to do it is to transform your application to AFP and insert the named groups information from there. AFP is exceedingly well equipped to take advantage of named groups, whether you’re using them to drive postal savings, streamline production or simply grant greater visibility into print operations. Named groups also help archival and retrieval systems. A few other data streams allow for named groups, but none do so as simply and seamlessly as AFP.
For print providers who face increasingly tight turnaround requests and ever-growing pressure to cut costs, simple, seamless streamlining is a huge boon. AFP’s design for high-speed production environments allows it to fit nicely into MIS department strategies, and its inherent tendency toward step-by-step documentation makes it especially well-suited for a role in providing quantitative bird’s-eye views into print operations. If you’re not already using named groups and AFP, consider looking into it – or asking your local AFP expert.
