Hybrid Mail

Time saved and costs trimmed by the Local Taxation Team.

The forward-thinking Local Taxation Team implements ‘Hybrid Mail’ to deliver reduced costs, improved efficiency and the elimination of a very dull task.

Who are the Local Taxation Team?

The Local Taxation team is responsible for the maintenance and administration of Council Tax and Business Rates accounts and the billing and collection of charges due. Their main purpose is to maintain and amend Council/Rate Taxpayers’ accounts because of changes in ownership, the awarding or withdrawing of discounts and reliefs, and any other relevant changes in circumstances and to deal with customer enquiries. They also provide advice and clarification on, liability, charges, entitlement to reliefs and related issues.

What was the issue?

The section sends out a lot of pieces of mail, sometimes thousands of letters at a time. Each of these must be addressed correctly, printed, collated, folded, packed into envelopes, franked and posted. In a year the section sends around 50,000 pieces of mail.
They sometimes need to add in leaflets, or sort through reminders to remove those being sent to Council clients, which needs to be done manually. This is time consuming, dull work, prone to human error.

There is a packing machine to help with the task, but its old and unreliable and needs to be replaced as it is prone to jamming and jams mean that the whole run needs to be repeated.

It takes a team of 25 to 30 people to pack between 5,000 and 8,000 letters in a day.

What have they done?

They have used a hybrid mail tool called GovMail. This system enables to complete a letter template and perform a mail merge in the normal manner to produce a mailshot. Instead of sending the job to print, it is sent to ‘GovMail’, which appears as another printer on the list. That is the last time they need to be involved with the mailshot.

Its then sent to a company that prints, packs, and posts the item of mail for them. As it is automated the system can be set to remove items being sent specific names or addresses, specific leaflets can be added at this point too. All at a cost of 45p a letter as opposed to the 75p a letter for 2nd class postage, it is as simple as that.

Results:
Costs saved and avoided:
        Cheaper postage costs.
        No need to replace packing machine.
        Staff time.
No human errors.
Elimination of a mundane and labour-intensive task.

Conclusion:

This tool should be considered for use by every Service in the Authority that needs to send physical mail.

GovMail works in a similar way to printing out a document. The difference is that instead picking up the printed document, putting it in an envelope, franking it and sending it, you simply print it to the ‘GovMail’ instead of a printer. Your document is sent to a company that prints, packs, franks and posts for you. This can be done for multiple documents and is cheaper than sending through a franking machine.
Users can:
• Print directly from their laptop at home or in the office.
• Preview and modify documents before sending.
• Include leaflets or flyers that need to be sent with letters.

• Reduced printing and mailing costs.
• Consolidates mail to secure large postage discounts via our partner..
• Improve efficiency with users printing packing, franking their own documents.
• Can be used from any location: Office or remotely.
• Supports consistent branding and Welsh language standards.

Your documents are encrypted at the point of creation, and then decrypted when they arrive our partner’s secure server.

Each user has access to a web portal and that reports the production status of every document submitted, and allows them to view an archived version of each page,including inserts. Fully itemised activity and reconciliation reports are provided, enabling the authority to monitor user activity.

It is estimated departments using GovMail will see a saving on postage costs in the region of a 30% of the current costs, in addition you will see a saving in time spent processing hard copy mail and managing stationery supplies.

Department managers should contact Mark Howard, Senior Transformation and Change Officer for a demonstration or you can contact the Transformation team via our webform to let us know where you think Govmail could be used in your team's processes.