February 21, 2006

If you’ve read my Postal Perspectives articles (Understanding MTAC), you may remember me mentioning the Mailers Technical Advisory Committee meetings, what they are, and why they are so important for our mailing industry. This week is another quarterly “MTAC week”, and I thought I’d cover a few of the exciting highlights that will likely be discussed during the next few days.

The Flats Sequence Sortation (FSS) is going to be discussed quite a bit, as it will certainly impact the industry in many ways. In fact, did you see Melissa Campanelli’s article ( http://www.dmnews.com/cgi-bin/artprevbot.cgi?article_id=35642 ) that mentioned a prototype FSS machine will be installed in Indianapolis in April? With an expected full deployment by spring of 2008, it’s a good thing that MTAC is setting up a special focus on FSS now. Firstlogic will certainly stay close to these changes and make sure to keep our customers well informed on the impact FSS will have on their mail delivery.

Another area we can expect to see covered this week at MTAC is address quality. Workgroup 97, address quality methodologies, is a workgroup that I have been co-chairing these past several months. We will present our final effort, a document that covers the twenty-seven best practices in address quality, at Thursday’s MTAC general meeting. This document will serve as a useful tool in exploring new ways to reduce undeliverable as addressed (UAA) mail, plus will build the argument to create two new workgroups to further efforts in reducing UAA. These two proposed workgroups are list certification and information dissemination. Remember, the Postmaster General is calling for a 50 percent reduction in UAA mail by 2010.

We also expect to hear more about what is going on at the Capitol regarding postal reform. As I wrote last week, both the House and the Senate have passed postal reform legislation. They are now working to align these two pieces into a single bill for President Bush to sign. The million dollar (or should I say twenty-seven million dollar) question is will the President actually sign it or will this be his very first veto?

Finally, I am anxiously waiting to hear more news about the new OneCode^SOLUTION™ (OC^S) Barcode (formerly called the 4-CB). Charles Bravo, SVP Intelligent Mail & Address Quality, is going to provide an update on this new technology. With the rollout of this new barcode, we will not only cleanup the address block, we will also set in place the opportunity to gain new visibility into the mail delivery network.

Lots of exciting topics in discussion this week…which one seems most interesting to you?