May 19, 2006

Perhaps it was the weather, increased travel costs, slashed budgets, or simply too many shows to choose from but last week’s Mailcom show in Atlantic City, NJ seemed much smaller than in the past. The advertised 6,500 attendees just didn’t seem to match the traffic I witnessed in the sessions or on the exhibit floor.

That being said, I will say that it was a great event nonetheless. Hot topics included address quality, bundle preparation changes, and of course the proposed rate increase filed by the USPS the previous week. In fact, one of the handouts at Mailcom was a rate sheet with the proposed prices.

One of the better attended sessions I sat in on was the session hosted by USPS SVP Charlie Bravo and Sue Taylor from Prudential. The topic was on the new 4-state barcode (4-CB) and its application in the OneCode Confirm and ACS. The OneCode Confirm is expected to begin later this spring for First class letters with support for Standard class letters in September. With the expanded digits in the 4-CB, Sue Taylor noted that there can now be a billion unique mail pieces tracked using 4-CB rather than the million available today using Planet Codes.

For OneCode ACS, Mr. Bravo noted that the PARS (Postal Automated Redirection Systems) needed to be upgraded in order to get that program started. This will likely take place sometime mid 2007, perhaps around the same time as the next rate case is implemented.

Speaking of rate cases, Mr. Bravo also mentioned the new approach to ACS. It’s a bit of a “carrot and stick” approach whereby mailers will receive an incentive price to use the 4-CB code and receive the first two scans of an address either free (First Class) or at 2 cents (Standard) and then get hit with a jump in price for any subsequent scans on the same address. In other words, if you do not update your database with the corrected address after two tries, you will start paying for poor data quality habits.

If you attended Mailcom, I am curious as to your thoughts of the show this spring. For those of you that missed it, there is always the show this fall in Las Vegas to consider.