How does American Litho enhance value and achieve cost savings through postal optimization?

How can American Litho’s Postal Optimization make an impact on your next mail campaign?

Truman: What is postage optimization?

Marion: My niche is postage optimization, What I do is, weigh all of it, I look at the lowest total cost per piece postage and freight. I work closely with the American Litho salesperson to prepare an analysis. They provide me with a data file, number of versions, piece weight, volume, and all the date criteria. I weigh out all the different options of the drop ship. If it’s a trade now, all drop ship, all commingle, or a hybrid. It all goes into an optimization comparison so we can make the most cost-effective decision for the client that still meets all delivery criteria.

Truman: What is a Hybrid Situation?

Marion: For a hybrid situation, we take anything that falls under the all-in commingle rate, and if there’s enough weight running that just drop ships. Then we only run co-production for the balance that needs that lift as far as the price point to then come to the commingle.

Truman: What about Co-Mail?

Marion: It’s a similar situation, you’re playing the under-over game, but that’s based on the carrier route for Flats. We do it all with drop ship, all co-mail. Then we analyze the percentage of carrier route to make sure we have enough weight.

Truman: How does that all come together for delivery?

Marion: We marry it up on the back end for in-home dates. So strategically, the standard dropship consolidation window is three days. We then flip the file and reconfigure between different pools to try and marry up the co-production to a similar three, four-day window.   

On the topic of Delivering for America.

Truman: There’s a lot of talk and open-ended questions going on at the Postal Service, but do you see anything that could change the way the logistics are handled with the Delivering for America Plan?

Marion: With the 10-year plan, in the way they’re reconfiguring the whole network, we just don’t know. When you look at the current USPS rates and the matrix, the saturation discounts and then the entry discounts, without knowing where those entry price points are going to be and or discounts, we can’t even begin to fathom how we’ll have to reconfigure, but I can promise it will be very different. We just don’t know to what level as far as logistics and/or pricing right now.

Truman: Thank you Marion for your insights and your time!