Metropolitan Housing Trust is using a ‘hybrid’ mail service from Unity to print and dispatch rent statement packs for tenants in its 17,000 properties across London.
MHT typically prints around 23,000 rent statement packs, each with personalised content and variable page numbers. Until March 2009, MHT used a non-secure mailing house, with the entire operation taking two weeks to complete.
In order to streamline this process and reduce costs, MHT started using Unity’s hybrid mail service which allows MHT to submit raw postscript data files direct from a PC, each with a variable number of pages and a variable return address on the reverse of each envelope. The letters were printed and posted within two days from receipt of data.
Unity took seven separate data files from MHT and opened and extracted address information, before purging the data and consolidating it into a single press-ready PDF. The file was then ‘mailsorted’ to take advantage of significant savings on standard postal rates. The mail was then digitally printed, folded, enclosed and sorted, before being sent to Unity’s mail provider for delivery.
Bernard Tominey, procurement director, Metropolitan Housing Trust, said, “Unity is brilliant. It has enabled us to send raw data from our system into a secure environment, and the speed with which we are able to see soft proofs and press the ‘go’ button has saved us huge amounts of time. It has given us massive efficiency gains in the production, printing and mailing of our transactional and ad-hoc customer communications.”
Using the Unity service, MHT saved one-third of standard postal rates and reduced the production time by eight working days which allowed MHT to release the data for the tenants’ rent statement later while still meeting legal requirements. MHT was also able to include variable return addresses on the envelopes and to produce large-font variants for tenants with visual impairments.
Tominey added, “Unity saves on wastage as we are now able to print both sides of the sheet reducing the amount of paper we use by half. We have saved further costs by complying with pricing in proportion.”
