Lake Michigan Mailers, Inc. Achieves Return on Investment within Six months with Integrated Flats Processing Solution from Engineering Innovation and Parascript
Lake Michigan Mailers, Inc. is a leading provider of First-Class presorting, direct mail design and assembly, mail processing, and distribution services to companies, universities, governmental units and non-profit organizations throughout the United States.
The company was looking for a cost-effective solution to automate the processing of a relatively lower volume of flats for the highest postal discounts possible. Due to its modest volume requirement, Lake Michigan Mailers needed a transport able to process hand printed and poor quality machine printed flats, often with crooked labels, at a low acquisition cost. Lake Michigan Mailers decided on Engineering Innovation’s EZ-Flats OCR Lite System, which incorporates Parascript’s AddressScript CM as a single OCR engine, because it was the most cost-effective solution to obtain postal discounts for its 4,000 – 5,000 flats per day.
Upon implementing the EZ-Flats system with Parascript® AddressScript® CM, Lake Michigan Mailers was able to immediately obtain postal automation discounts and achieved a return on investment within six months of operation. Lake Michigan Mailers was also able to increase customer satisfaction with faster processing times and lower postage rates, while maintaining a low degree of investment risk.
The integrated solution from Parascript and Engineering Innovation achieves address recognition and interpretation rates of 95 percent of machine print and handwritten addresses. EZ-Flats allows Lake Michigan Mailers to process 20,000 to 25,000 flats per week, with room to scale at full capacity at 1,400 to 2,000 flats per hour. EZ-Flats tracks every mail piece to its maximum discount level for easy verification and billing.
In incorporating Parascript’s AddressScript OCR Technology, EZ-Flats automatically reads addresses with the highest read rates achievable, greatly reducing time, cost and labor commonly associated with mail processing. It locates and captures an address block on envelope and flats images to efficiently process the entire mail stream. It reads any character type—cursive, handprint and machine print—in any combination to provide a universal address recognition and validation solution.
According to David C. Rhoa, president of Lake Michigan Mailers, Inc., "We can’t say enough about the EZ-Flats system with Parascript’s AddressScript OCR and how it has helped us to grow our business, expand our processing capabilities and increase the markets we serve. In the early days of automated mail we had to examine the specific items that needed to be processed before determining if the job could be done. Now, with our integrated solution from Engineering Innovation and Parascript, we can rest assured that Lake Michigan Mailers can easily handle any job."
Lake Michigan Mailers is online at www.lakemichiganmailers.com. More information on Parascript is at www.parascript.com and on Engineering Innovation at www.eii-online.com.
