PCF links up with E-Commerce provider to laser print and mail high volume supplier Remittances

In today's business climate, corporate customers are highly receptive to solutions that reduce costs and increase efficiency.

PCF's comprehensive bureau facility for all types of transactional printing and mailing of invoices, statements, remittances etc provides major time and cost benefits for the clients of one of the UK's major E-Commerce businesses. PCF's bureau facility is utilised daily by this E- Commerce business on behalf of its international corporate clients.

The E-Commerce business provides its corporate customers with internet-based, managed services that easily and seamlessly link their business with trading partners. The service enables the sure and secure exchange of business documents electronically. Many major corporations already enjoy the benefits of this secure e-business platform. This E-Commerce service currently connects approximately 34,000 suppliers, providing over 100,000 secure, reliable transactions each week, accounting for over €8 billion worth of business each year.

However not all suppliers and clients of the corporate clients are ready or able to receive and process E-Commerce transactions, and this is where PCF's 'seamless' print and mail service for remittances etc comes in to play.

On behalf of the E-Commerce client PCF has developed 16 different language introductory letters and remittance advices, for one particular major electronics corporation, these are sent to their suppliers worldwide. On a daily basis a data file of remittance data is securely transmitted to PCF and on receipt of the file a notification report is then sent back. PCF then processes the remittance advice data conditionally checking the data for any remittance advices that require the introductory letter to be printed with the remittance advice in the correct language.

To avoid any incorrect insertions in the envelopes OMR marks are printed onto the remittances and additionally a security camera is used at the point of insertion into the envelopes to check that the correct inserts are always present. Every document has an incremental number applied at the time of print. This number will appear through the window of the envelope. The camera software will constantly read the numbering in the window of the envelope and if a document has been wrongly inserted it will recognise the change in number and will stop the enveloping process.

To reduce postage costs the mailings are sorted using the Post Office walk sort routes which results in significant discounts in the UK and also we pre-sort into the four worldwide global postal regions.

After each run a report is then emailed back to our E-Commerce client confirming the number of pages printed along with the number of envelopes dispatched and this whole process is automatically driven when each new data file is received by PCF.

Following the success of this application over the past 3 years PCF expects a further 30 (approx) major corporations to link up with this service over the next 12 months.