Internet and Technology

What you need to know about USPS Software.
There was a time when mail was sorted manually and the pigeon was the courier. Now it sounds like a part of a fairy tale. Nowadays advancement in technology has brought about a sea change in the entire system. The USPS is an acronym for United States Postal Service.
USPS is a government owned agency situated in the United States and is responsible for delivery of mail. USPS is one of the oldest government organizations in the USA and holds a kind of monopoly on many aspects of delivering mail. Through the USPS, citizens can send mail and parcels to almost any part of the world at reasonable prices.
The Intelligent Mail Barcode, popularly known as IMB is a new system introduced by USPS. It is a next generation of barcode technology that can be used for sorting and tracking letters and flats. It combines the capabilities of the Planet Code barcode and the POSTNET barcode into one unique form of barcode.
Many software companies design USPS software or USPS shipping software. They create and provide software solutions for direct mail, marketing, document design and data quality. Let us discuss some of its products they offer.
MaxPresort is one of the most comprehensive and powerful product for United States Postal Service bulk mailings. It is ideally suited for business which have direct marketing campaigns, or else who serve others who mail. This software helps in taking advantage of the huge postage discounts that are offered by the USPS. They can presort mail of different types like letters, NFMs, flats and parcels. This sorting is done in USPS classes -Periodicals, First-Class Mail, Package Services and Standard Mail. Apart from presorting mail, the software also has an optimization routine so that you can further maximize your discounts.
MaxPresort also supports the Intelligent Mail Barcodes. It can be used with the Basic as well as the Full Service Options and includes Intelligent Mail Container Label and the Intelligent Mail Tray Label.
Another product is the IMB Manager. This technology allows users to create an Intelligent Mail barcode for files that are generated by any type of presort or Mail.dat product. It also allows users to manage their exclusive Intelligent Mail Serial Numbers either within a single Mailer ID or else across multiple mails for the same Mailer ID. This is how it works. First, it creates all three kinds of Intelligent Mail Serial Numbers. Then it creates a database which can track the 45-day expiration dates for these Serial Numbers. The interface is intuitive and easy to use.
MaxOG is another product that uses functionality from MaxPrint, a great document creation and printing software. It can produce a wide array of documents and labels with the help of pictures, text, ovals, tables, boxes, lines and fill patterns in various font, color or orientation. By using MaxOG you will be able to create letters as well as name-and-address labels using Intelligent Mail Tray, Intelligent Mail barcodes, Container Labels and also Inkjet files.
Thus you can effectively use these products for direct mail and marketing or document designing.

The importance of keeping your mailing list names and personal data up to date and accurate can not be understated. Billions of dollars are lost every year by large and small businesses because they ship correspondence to people who have moved, send duplicate mailings, mailings to addresses that do not exists and similar mistakes. By combining data and USPS software together the benefits will be significant.
Data Quality Software is the software that can convert the existing data into an integrated format by creating new fields, merging various files, and by summarizing and filtering it. The process “Data Quality” is the reliability and effectiveness of data, particularly in a data warehouse.
Data quality is much more than just records, fields and values-it’s about establishing business. From personal decisions, customer relationship to control of inventory, operations and even regulatory compliance, quality data forms the very foundation of a successful and flourishing enterprise.
Data quality assurance (DQA) is the method employed to verify the reliability and effectiveness of a data. Maintaining data quality requires going through the data periodically and scouring it. Generally this involves updating it, standardizing it, and de-duplicating records to make a single view of the data, even if it is stored in multiple variant systems.
Since data quality is so important from a business perspective, many large companies employ a data steward to be in charge of data quality. There are many vendor applications in the market to make this job easier.
It becomes easier to match your customer’s records with the help of this software. This improves the quality of your data. Usually computers trip over or ignore if the records don’t match. For instance a computer won’t know that Mac and Mack is the same person. The system is not designed to identify the slight variations in the characters, but data quality software knows this. It uses many other parameters to check the identity of two persons/names. The software also ensures that each customer has only one profile in your computer. This can have the added advantage of properly greeting a customer online when they log in. If certain criteria match, the system can anticipate that the person or group are affiliated and properly populate data.
How significant it is to have a Data Quality Software is we can understand by the following factual example: Gartner study says that poor quality customer data costs U.S. business an estimated $611 billion dollars a year in postage, printing, and staff overhead of reading data from operational systems.
The USPS is the least expensive way to ship letters and small merchandise in general in the USA. The USPS software and Data Quality software will enhance the profitability of every business. By maintaining the cleanest data records there will be less duplicate mailings, less returned mailings, a much stronger ability to sort potential customers and track results. In the challenging time the clean interface and ease-of-use of data quality tools makes is fast and a definite for all businesses looking to maximize their marketing dollars.