Postal technology

At Lehigh Direct we pride ourselves on being on the lead edge of Postal technology. We are members of all mailing organizations such as: PCC, DMA, and MTAC to name a few.

This past year has presented us and the entire mailing community with new challenges. Everything that we knew about mailing had to be examined and reexamined to make sure that we are staying within the new tighter postal regulation while at the same time providing our customers with innovative mailing formats. Our goal is to produce formats that will stand out in the mail box while keeping our customers postage on budget.

Postage increases are and will be an annual event with the signing of the Postal Act of 2006. Even though we can set our clocks to postage increases happening every May, there are ways to keep these increases to a minimum. Lehigh offers a wide array of services designed to optimize your postal dollar. We look at each job individually and assess what is the most economic way to mail and most importantly keeping the in home date as the immovable object. These two things are sometimes mutually exclusive but we customize solutions that strike this balance. One such solution is our ability to drop a mailing at standard rates but get in home in First Class time. We accomplish this by going to as many SCF’s as possible within a day of the mail drop. Although more freight charges are incurred, the difference between First Class presort and our service is still very large. On average this service costs our customers 25% less to mail as compared to First Class.

Other solutions that we offer are co-palletization, and co-mingling where it makes sense. Accompanying the annual postage increases are usually increases in potential postal discounts. These discounts are obtainable through work sharing. Our experience has shown that the least amount of intervention that the USPS has in your mailing the more money you can save. To this end we make sure that our formats will withstand the postal systems equipment and avoid the need for manual intervention at the postal facilities.

Our eye stays on optimizing postal savings in the pre-sort process as well. Lehigh Direct has its own Data processing department with many years of postal knowledge. Our data department will optimize all jobs based on the customer’s requirements for an individual mailing. Some of the largest discounts can be obtained simply by entering as many SCF’s as possible. Our data team will presort to the finest level of SCF penetration as possible.

Lehigh also offers complete traceability of mail all the way to the front door. We accomplish this by tracing mail from the point of origin directly to the receiving Postal facility. Then Lehigh Mail Track takes over and reports how much mail is getting in home every day.

Lehigh has also been innovative by being among the first to use IMB as our standard barcode. We have gained much experience over the last year resulting in a seamless migration to 100% IMB later this year.

We are excited about partnering with the DMA and MTAC by participating in the mail piece design analysis of folded self mailers. Lehigh will submit innovative formats for MTAC to analyze.

Even though the mailing community is going through some tough times right now, we at Lehigh know that with our innovative thinking, we will continue to lead the industry in delivering mail on time and on budget.