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Volume 8, Issue 2 Beyond the Buzz: Understanding Mailing Options
With the specter of another postal increase looming, there’s a lot of chatter among printers and publishers alike about drop-shipping, commingling and co-palletizing. Hugh Tolson, United Litho’s mail services manager, helps clarify the issues involved. You've heard the hype: printers and mailers offering to shave hundreds of dollars off your postage costs each issue while saving days in the mail stream. The caveats and disclaimers are mentioned in much softer voices, if at all. Drop-shipping Because the USPS has little interest in trucking mail from Point A to Point B across the country, it builds incentives into the rates for both Standard and Periodicals mail to encourage mailers to move the mail closer to the point of delivery. Drop-shipping refers to trucking and entering mail at postal sorting facilities closer to its final destination. There are three destination entry discounts for Standard mail: the Destination Delivery Unit (DDU) discount, the Bulk Mail Center (BMC) discount and the Sectional Center Facility (SCF) discount. Although the DDU is the largest discount available, it’s available only in very specific high-density carrier-route mailings; consequently, mailers tend to focus instead on the BMC and SCF discounts. For each pound of mail you’re able to enter at one of the 29 BMCs in the United States, you’ll get a $0.10 discount, while the discount for mail entered at one of several hundred SCFs is $0.125 per pound. If you can fill a truck with 40,000 pounds of Standard mail going to a BMC or SCF, you’ll definitely reduce your postage costs. But there are expenses, too—among them, trucking costs, fuel surcharges and the mailer’s administrative costs. Your true savings are what’s left over after those expenses are subtracted. For Periodicals mail, the calculation is even trickier since rates are determined separately for the advertising and non-advertising portions of the book (as measured by weight). The advertising portion is subject to zone charges, which increase with the distance between the entry point and the delivery destination. For this reason, magazines with a significant amount of advertising may benefit from SCF and/or ADC (Area Distribution Center) discounts. However, since zone charges don’t apply to the non-advertising portion, a periodical with little or no advertising is likely to incur the trucking costs associated with drop-shipping without realizing any savings. Another term you may have heard is pool shipping—the process of storing mail from multiple sources until there is enough mail to warrant a truck dispatch. The issue here, of course, concerns timely delivery of the mail. Is it better to wait for mail to accumulate to get the discount? What happens when one of the pool participants is late? Does the mail get even later, or do those participants who are ready to go absorb a higher trucking rate per pound shipped? If you have enough volume, the shipping issues are easier to overcome. But smaller publishers need to weigh the trade-offs carefully. Look at overall costs—not just postage savings—and ask to see a pro forma itemized bill using your specific distribution data as the model. Commingling The USPS offers a number of discounts to mailers for “presorting” the mail prior to its entry into the mail stream, with each package rate based on the handling it will require subsequent to entry. The package itself defines the rate, so each piece in a given package pays the same rate. Since the rate goes up as the amount of handling increases, the biggest discount goes to those packages that contain only pieces destined for the same carrier route. Commingling—the process of mixing pieces of mail from multiple sources to produce such packages—requires that the mailer increase the universe of mail being sorted to get as many pieces as possible out of the higher rate structures and into the lower rate structures. This can be done either by creating multiple magazines in a single run on a stitcher or binder, or by using mail from multiple jobs to create a single mail stream in an off-line process. The goal, of course, is to get the mail out of bags and onto pallets so it can be drop-shipped, thus enjoying the best of both discount worlds. Generally, this is achieved with a “co-mailing” machine, which requires building a queue and creating a new presort to marry the multiple titles, weights, shapes and sizes into a single mail stream. As before, the key ingredient is volume—enough titles with mail going to Co-palletizing In April 2003, the USPS introduced an experimental rate structure to create an incentive for small-distribution periodical publications to combine packages from multiple mailings onto common-destination-entry skids; as with commingling, the goal is to get mail out of sacks and onto pallets for drop-shipment. Only mail that would otherwise have been in bags is eligible for this rate structure. Though tantalizing, these savings can be hard to come by. First, a tremendous amount of physical effort is required to sort thousands of packages, from many mailings, into common-destination pallets of 250 pounds or more. Currently the Fairrington Transportation Corp. has a project underway to automate this sorting process. Although not yet in full production as of mid-March, the machine developed for Fairrington has performed very successfully in tests. Second, once sorted, you’d still need enough pallets going to the same destination to make the trucking efficient, since drop-shipping is where the real savings are. Co-palletization also requires two sets of postal paperwork: one set demonstrating that all the mail pieces for which the discount is being claimed would have been in bags to begin with, and a second set that supports the co-palletized mail. Bottom Line Although there are a number of mailers drop-shipping, a few commingling and fewer still co-palletizing, without enough volume it’s impossible to offset the costs of sorting the mail and trucking it to the destination entry point. Other than the obvious sorting, handling and shipping costs, expect to find charges for presort, mailer administration and fuel. Look beyond “estimated postal savings,” and make sure you know how all these processes work and how you will be billed for them. Despite their potential, drop-shipping, commingling and co-palletization opportunities for small publication mailers are unfortunately still very limited at this point. As always, however, United Litho is committed to investigating options, providing timely information updates and exploring potential solutions to help our customers realize savings wherever possible. TechTips: Troubleshooting OS X Crashes happen. And once they start, I know you’ll do anything to keep them from happening again. Here are a few ideas to help once you start getting the dreaded message: “The application X has unexpectedly quit.” Repair disk permissions. This is an easy and safe step that will cure many OS X ills. Quit the programs you have running, go into your Applications > Utilities folder and find the program named Disk Utility. Run it, choose the drive you boot from in the list of volumes on the left, and then click on the button labeled “Repair Disk Permissions.” It may take a few minutes, but if OS X finds a file or folder with an incorrect setting, it’ll fix that situation immediately. Clean out your cache. OS X uses caching extensively to keep things running smoothly and as fast as possible. Caches are files on your hard drive that hold frequently accessed information. Occasionally these files may get corrupt from application crashes, power spikes or hard-drive anomalies, and can cause crashes as a result. Unfortunately, there’s no built-in way to detect the corruption; the best way to fix it is to delete the cache and start over. The good news is that there is a freeware program that will do this for you. Visit www.nonamescriptware.com, click on “downloads” and then “main scripts” and look for Cache Out X. Installing and running this program will let you selectively and safely remove the various caches from your computer. This process can fix a variety of crashing issues, including font trouble. Delete preferences files. This tip helped my coworker recover her Quark 6, which was unexpectedly quitting seconds after it was launched. If this happens to you, a possible solution is to delete Quark’s preferences file. Navigate to your user home > Library > Preferences folder. Select the folder named Quark, drag it to the trash and empty the trash. Of course, you will lose your preferences, including any customized settings such as print styles and hyphenations, but will you complain if you get your Quark back? Launching Quark will rebuild your Quark preferences folder with clean files. Create a user. If you think more than one preference file may be bad, creating a new user in OS X may be in order. This is done within the Accounts System Preference by clicking on the plus (+) sign and entering a name and password. Reboot, and see which problems go away. Then, switch back to your old account and delete the preferences of the programs that failed. Proof update Within the next few weeks, you’ll begin seeing a slightly different-looking proof for your magazine. We’re always looking for ways to streamline our processes and improve service, and we’ve just found an Epson printer that will print two-page spreads, rather than the 8-up sheets the HP produces. The new proofs—a bit sharper, with more accurate color representation—will follow the same book format, but will be a little bigger (approximately 9x12") and will use a screened border to represent the bleed, rather than blue lines. You’ll also notice some internal markings that you’re not accustomed to seeing—crop marks, numerical coding, etc.—but they shouldn’t affect the way you view your proof. Gerald Byrne: The Man Behind the Curtain “I’m not someone who goes for the limelight—I like working in the background,” says Gerald Byrne, a 35-year-old father of three who spent more than seven years in United Litho’s digital prepress department before making the switch in November 2004 to his most challenging role yet. As Client Services Systems Administrator, Byrne is still working the controls behind the curtain, administering and providing technical support for two key internal information systems—Toolbox, a software program that helps account managers expedite production planning for each magazine that comes through the door, and SalesLogix, a sales call tracking system used by ULI account executives to manage client contacts. But by providing backup for Technical Support Representative Andrew Moore, he’s begun to be recognized outside ULI as well. “Obviously,” he says, “when it comes to the systems I administer, my ‘clients’ are all internal—account managers, account executives and marketing staff. I make sure the AMs and AEs can do their jobs effectively, which ultimately affects their clients. But I also talk to customers directly each day. It’s great because I can rely on my DPP experience to resolve issues quickly, and talking to customers gives me an opportunity to see what they have to work through. Working with Toolbox and SalesLogix, you can easily get absorbed in the systems. Talking to external clients is a nice break. It’s a reminder of who the real customers are.” Byrne says his days are never dull because the calls he receives are “all over the spectrum—just like our client base. Some are very involved, with technical issues that you may address once in a lifetime; others come from folks who’ve been thrown suddenly into production without ever having used a page layout program and are trying to figure out where the tools are. Because I speak to people with completely different backgrounds, I have to know how to tailor my answers. The experienced client doesn’t want to be talked to like a beginner—and the beginner definitely doesn’t want me to assume he understands more than he does.” He adds that having been on the receiving end of technical support in his role as systems administrator has made him a better source of support himself. “Being a customer has made me very aware of how I handle our clients when they call for help—because I know how I like to be handled when I’m the customer.” Whether it’s working with clients or database systems, Byrne says, “the majority of my time is spent trouble-shooting or figuring out how something works—and I find that endlessly fascinating.” Shannon Marzolf, Client Services leader and Byrne’s supervisor, says, “Gerald has a great attitude and is always willing to help out. He takes the initiative to make things happen and he has a tremendous amount of enthusiasm for the job. He embodies the culture of ULI and he’s wonderfully customer focused. Gerald is just a great success story.” An Extraordinary Service Experience: Maryland Life With its origins in an entrepreneurship class attended by its three founding partners, Maryland Life magazine is itself something of a case study in entrepreneurial spirit. Covering the class in his capacity as managing editor for another Maryland-based magazine, Dan Patrell struck up a friendship with Ross Peddicord and Scott Runkles, and they began to get together outside of class to put what they’d learned into practice. “We learned a lot in this class,” Patrell says, “but most importantly, we learned that whenever possible, it’s great to split the leadership roles three ways.” With his editorial background, Patrell became president and editor; Runkles’ background in mortgage banking made him the right fit for vice president of finance and operations; and Peddicord, who had been director of marketing at Mount St. Mary’s, became vice president of advertising and marketing. The three share the title of co-publisher. “It took us two years of working nights and weekends, talking to other publishers about what they did and how they did it,” Patrell says. “Finally, in April 2004, we had a plan we were comfortable with.” That plan called for a glossy, coffee table-style magazine that would celebrate Maryland, highlighting the destinations, dining, history, home styles and people that make the state special. After additional tweaking from Baltimore-based investment consultants, the business plan was ready to be presented to potential investors, and the funding soon followed. With the backing of some of Maryland’s leaders in publishing and finance, including George B. Delaplaine Jr., Great State Publishing became “official” in August 2004. At that point, Patrell says, the process really accelerated. “It happened in waves. Once it became a reality, we had to sell ads—that’s probably the most challenging part of the business. We also needed to locate readers—we had 2,000 paid subscribers before the first book came out!—and we began to interview printers to find the right printer for us.” Patrell had worked with another printer for years, and had been very comfortable with them. “Not only was the relationship good,” he says, “but I knew their product.” But ULI Account Executive April Sellers had also been keeping in touch, and when Patrell contacted her to discuss his new project, she pulled out all the stops. “I knew we had the kind of resources available that could eally make a difference with a new launch,” Sellers says. “[Mail Services Manager] Hugh Tolson has helped them get their newsstand distribution set up and is working with them to achieve Periodicals status, [Tech Support Rep] Andy Moore has been a big help to their art director, [Client Trainer] Rebecca Hoeckele got them up and running with Proteus publication planning software for their very first issue, and [Account Manager] Robynann Burkett has been a great resource for them.” Patrell says he couldn’t agree more. “We had a good feeling about this relationship from the beginning. We felt like we were going to be taken care of, and we really have been,” he says. “Service has been wonderful! Everyone at United Litho helps us get our magazine through the system, out and into the mail. They never seem to think they’ve gone above and beyond—but they do, every day. They bend over backwards for us.” He says that the New Title Start-Up Meeting set the tone for the whole relationship. “Everyone at the meeting on our end—except our art director and me—was new to printing, and the concept of this meeting was beyond us ... imagine trying to resolve issues before they arise! But the meeting was great—it helped out in a lot of ways. It just underscores the quality of service we receive.” Patrell also offers rave reviews on the quality of the finished product. “We love the printing, and the paper is fantastic. Maryland Life is designed to be a keepsake book, so the appearance is really important.” Noting that Patrell always comes for a press observation, Sellers says, “I think he expected to get on press and make lots of changes, but he didn’t have to. I think our press crew really impressed him.” Patrell adds that he’s been pleased with Burkett’s expertise, as well. “Robynann has a great eye for color—an eye we’ll be relying on in future press observations.” Burkett explains, “Maryland Life has a lot of four-color photos and ads, and we’ve had some color challenges on press. But Dan understands the process and is able to let us know what’s more important [in any conflict] so that he’s happy with the total outcome. I think he trusts us.” She adds that Maryland Life’s press observations always have something of a “party” atmosphere. “For the first press observation, I think there were five of us on press ... for 121⁄2 hours. They were so excited to have their premier issue printed that they took the printing plates for the cover home with them. They’re very excited and passionate about this magazine—it’s really nice to see.” Sellers says that during Patrell’s most recent press observation, a discussion about some of the training the ULI sales team had been receiving seemed to spark his imagination. “He asked if Wayne Peterson [vice president of sales and marketing] would be willing to talk to the Maryland Life sales team. To make a long story short, next month Wayne and I will be joining Dan and his partners for a working lunch to discuss this further,” Sellers says. She adds, “They’re definitely looking for a partnering relationship. Not only do they want to find a good company to do business with, but it seems like they also want to be friends with—and have fun with—their printer. It’s just the kind of relationship we like to have!”
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