Extending Production Visibility from Print Floor to Mailbox with SOLitrack Mail Tracking

Hello. Welcome to this session about mail tracking and how it integrates with SOLitrack. Since we’re focusing on SOLitrack, let’s first give a quick overview about what it’s about. SOLitrack is a key component to our Chemistry platform that handles several important roles in production environments as it enables many of the workflow related concepts such as job batching, SLA views, scheduling, proofs and approvals, an operator console, job routing and distribution for the production process, and letting you know when things are going well but when there are issues by providing alert notifications along with reporting, and as it relates to this session, job and mail piece tracking.

For tracking jobs through production, SOLitrack has both a thick client and a built in web dashboard that allow operators, customer service reps, and even customers to see a customizable, secure set of information concerning jobs. The SLA management and scheduling capability provides a summary view for operators to help ensure that work is prioritized and produced on schedule.

Built to be part of your overall operational infrastructure, SOLitrack has an open API and webhooks to support integration with adjacent systems. When combined with intelligent insertion equipment, SOLitrack can become the backbone of your integrated automated document factory or ADF workflow. Piece level tracking, reporting, manual and automated reprinting are all built into the system. The job batching capability can automatically combine like work based upon sales, production specifications, and job types. This allows for many small jobs to be combined to achieve economies of scale for production and postal optimization.

Okay, so now let’s look more closely at mail tracking. There are several parts to this topic, so we’ll break it down into a few pieces, starting with defining SOLitrack’s mail tracking. The mail tracking is an optional module that uses data from mail tracking services to add delivery status to mail pieces within the SOLitrack dashboard. Mail tracking requires SOLitrack’s piece level tracking module and SOLsearcher Enterprise, and Rubika is recommended but not required for mail piece tracking. The integration supports the information returned from various systems, such as the USPS and United Mail, and BCC. Typically, to track the status of each record during delivery, the Intelligent Mail barcode, or IMB on each piece is scanned. The related reporting supports mail piece level status reports. These reports enable users to select what status they’re interested in and see the percentage of a completion for the matching jobs. For example, you can generate a report on what percentage of jobs completed in the last seven days have been delivered, or what percentage of all jobs routed to a device have been printed.

SOLitrack’s piece level tracking of each stage in the production workflow supports the delivery or mail tracking status as returned from the USPS SingleSource ACS files. This enables users to track, reconcile, and report on undeliverable mail pieces, including mail pieces that have been returned, forwarded, or securely destroyed by the USPS. SOLitrack’s mail piece tracking information is also updated by the fulfillment date, deliverability or scan code, and the USPS site columns.

Here are a sample piece level reports showing the total impression and mail piece count for jobs, along with the status percent of pieces that have been mailed, delivered, or returned. The reports can also be exported to a file for use in other systems. Here’s an example where additional notes are added to the records that provides the associated mail tracking information. This can be helpful for customer service reps or tracking down the disposition of a mail piece in production. The notes are open to contain any information, so users can add their own commentary about each record as needed to help with the history of records activities. For instance, a customer service rep might want to make a note to the piece related to a conversation they had with the customer or the production floor. Managers can attach special instructions, such as the courier tracking number to the record.

Here’s an example of how the tracking information is displayed in SOLitrack’s mobile dashboard. You can see a view where the top list contains jobs, and when you select a job that has the piece level tracking enabled, you’ll see a list in the second pane with all of the pieces in the job. When you select a specific piece, you’re then presented with piece level information, including mail tracking information in the bottom pane.

Here’s a larger view of the bottom pane so you can see the mail tracking information. You can see every one of the physical and logical touches made to the mail piece, as reported by the U.S. Postal Service, as it moves through their system. This information is a breadcrumb trail that allows you to identify not just where the piece was delivered or returned, but where it got into trouble along the way, along with the date and time stamps, codes, descriptions, and locations. The same type of information is also available in the client interface, where you can see a number of pieces, dates and their values, including return and delivered mail.

SOLitrack already tracks pieces as soon as each jobs index is ingested. Then through the production processes such as finishing and then mail tracking, extends the visibility all the way to the recipient’s mailbox. When customer service reps receive queries about a specific communication, you can now have detailed information beyond just knowing if it was mailed. This can be used to provide positive proof that you have met your responsibility to get the pieces in the mail stream by providing proof of an initial scan. After that, it’s the responsibility of the United States Postal Service to get it to the recipient. SOLitrack can provide reports in response to queries regarding delivery of specific pieces or groups or pieces. Just note that the data provided here is not intended to provide detailed analytics concerning costs, deliverability, mailing efficiency, or to identify gaps in the USPS performance. That type of information is available directly from USPS and other mail tracking services through their dashboards that are optimized to help your postal experts determine whether you can improve your data or processes to reduce costs and improve the overall deliverability of mail from your organization, and whether they need to discuss quality of services with the USPS.

This diagram shows a pretty standard high-level mail tracking workflow. The workflow for integration with mechanical presort vendors is different, which we’ll cover later. Here, the job is registered in SOLitrack and begins its journey. Typically, customers will index the job, then use Rubika to integrate with the postal sortation software like BCC or others. We receive the IMB from the postal processing software and add it to the index information. The job then runs through and completes its workflow, where at that point the mail tracking step is initiated. Mail tracking is accomplished by defining a mail tracking point in SOLitrack. Then, mail tracking systems provide a data feed to the results folder that the tracking point is monitoring. The data feed contains tracking information about all of the pieces mailed by the mailer, and SOLitrack identifies pieces using their Intelligent Mail barcode, or IMB, and adds tracking information to the piece level information stored in SOLitrack. Note that the USPS does not know what SOLitrack job the piece was part of, and there may be information in the feed about pieces not even processed by SOLitrack.

Just like the Postal Service, SOLitrack uses the IMB as a unique identifier to match tracking data to mail pieces. A quick side note about IMB is that they’ve been around for a long time now, and have enabled new services like tracking for every first-class mail piece in the system. Without getting into too much detail, they contain information about the type of service, the mailer, a unique piece ID along with the routing information including the zip code. The unique IDs can be reused after 45 days, which isn’t an issue since the delivery time is usually within a week, unless the piece gets lost along the way.

SOLitrack tracks two different types of tracking points. One is designed to be used with camera systems or barcode readers, to ensure that every piece has been seen before moving on to the next step in the process, or completing the job. And the other is mail tracking, which behaves differently. Mail tracking acts upon jobs that are already complete and really just matches up USPS tracking data to individual pieces populating the piece level tracking information.

SOLitrack currently has prebuilt support for three different tracking services: the United States Postal Service, IV-MTR, BCC Software’s Track and Trace, and United Direct Solutions Commingle reporting service. Let’s go over these next.

The main point is that all of the tracking services get the same data from the same place. The United States Postal Service postal software vendors can provide a value-added layer between the United States Postal Service and their customers, adding additional analytics and reporting. But they’re using the same source data from the USPS at the mail piece level. Comminglers accept mail pieces from many different customers and place them into a mechanical presort machines to optimize them for presentment to the USPS. They basically do a bunch of work for the USPS, and in return, they receive discounts on the mailing.

Let’s start by talking about the USPS, because it’s the primary data source for all of the others. Informed Visibility is the tracking platform for the United States Postal Service. There’s many facets, and you can learn about them if you’re interested by going to their website. Every first-class mail piece is tracked by the USPS, and as a recipient, this is part of the Informed Delivery that you care about the most. You can subscribe to the free service and get daily emails letting you know what will be in your mailbox, including letters and packages. If you’re not using the service, it’s worth taking a look at and to know what’s in the mail before you get it. And it’s especially handy if you’re away from home to know what should have been delivered. This is part of the system that mailers care about the most. It provides tools that bulk mailers can use to not only track mail, but to track financial information, USPS performance, and much more. It’s a valuable tool for mailers. The persons tasked with postal affairs at bulk mailers will know all about this tool where most people in the production line of business and other upstream areas typically are not concerned with it. Access to this tool is typically limited to a small number of people within an organization, usually because the information is really only interesting to postal experts, which is why SOLitrack only carries a subset of this information that’s relevant for customer service reps, line of business, and production staff.

Moving on from the USPS, BCC has a service called Track and Trace that uses USPS data as an input and has a rich set of reports providing detailed analytics that your postal processing staff will love. It also has an interface that allows SOLitrack to easily get our data directly from it, rather than going directly to the USPS. Since the USPS is still involved, you could alternatively integrate with the USPS directly if you choose to go that way.

United Direct Solutions takes your mail and the mail from other mailers and combines it together using the sorting machine. This is similar to what the Post Office does when it receives non-presorted first-class mail. So, when they perform this first level of presort and apply IMB barcodes the pieces prior to the dropping them in the mail system, significant discounts are received, and the mail usually will get to the recipient faster, because some of the sorting work is already done. The data flow with the USPS is pretty straightforward. The person that your organization with access to IV-MTR sets up a feed to drop the data in the folder that SOLitrack is monitoring. SOLitrack reads in the files and scans through it, looking for embeds as the mail piece identifiers, and when it finds a match, it has to delivery information to each piece.

With BCC, the process is basically the same, except for getting the data feed from and back into the USPS. As mentioned, United Direct Solutions is a commingle layer that combines work for many different mailers into a single mail run so they can mail it themselves. So, they create the IMB and spray it on the mail piece, where they are identified as the mailer and the barcode.

Since tracking mail can only be done by the mailer, who in this case is the United Direct Solutions, they use the USPS service to track their mailing, and SOLitrack connects to their service to track not all of the mail from the United Direct, but just the pieces that are part of a specific job. Well, this process is different from the other two, it provides the same results.

Most of the time the staff in the print mail workflow area production are not logistics experts. They’re not aware of and don’t need to know about all the intricacies of how USPS routes mail internally within their systems, but you might have at least one person that does care about this. That person is probably already using tools from the USPS, BCC, and others to do analytics to understand the contours of your mailings, how they’re distributed areas and post the routing that can introduce delays, and so on. They would be aware of the costs and what’s been paid the USPS for the service, and should serve as the managers of the relationship with the USPS and your organization since their needs with the dashboard and reporting are different from that from the print and finishing folks that are interested in. The interfaces that the mail and postal folks use are intended for different users in the production floor dashboards. That’s why they use the USPS, BCC, and United Direct dashboards directly. Also, those dashboards are free with the service, but are typically only available to a few people within your organization, and these people are usually not SOLitrack users. SOLitrack provides access to the information that’s important to print production management and customer service representatives and multiple specialized dashboards around mailing is a good thing.

To wrap up, SOLitrack’s mail tracking is an optional module that uses data from the mail tracking services to add delivery status to mail pieces within the SOLitrack dashboard to extend this visibility from before a piece is printed until it’s delivered to the recipient. This helps to leverage SOLitrack’s capabilities and helps round out your offerings with customer service tasks and production floor information.

Thank you for your time. We hope you found this session helpful, and feel free to reach out to us with any questions.