Whether you’re beginning to explore becoming a USPS Seamless Acceptance provider or already running Seamless Parallel, you can learn about the challenges and benefits of our journey in becoming a USPS Seamless Acceptance Mailing Service Provider.
The Decision Process
In 2018, Midwest Direct began to run the USPS Seamless Parallel program for several years while monitoring our scorecard. Once our scorecard was passing with flying colors, we then looked at the potential costs and benefits of completing the conversion to Seamless Acceptance. During our decision process, we carefully considered the increased data, quality control and logistics costs that we would incur to be successful. While there are some soft benefits to the program, there are also some upfront and ongoing costs and process changes that need to be explored and refined before transitioning to seamless. As seamless is the wave of the future, we knew this was a necessary step to remain in the commercial mailing business. With all that in mind, we determined that Seamless Acceptance made sense for our organization and decided to move forward. We are now running as a successful Seamless Acceptance mail service provider.
The Conversion Process
We began our conversion with our Pittsburgh facility in February 2018 and added our Cleveland facility seven months later. We were completely converted to Seamless Acceptance by September 2018.
Overall, our experience with Seamless Parallel and Seamless Acceptance is positive, but it wasn’t all smooth sailing. Here’s a quick rundown of the potential benefits and the challenges we’ve experienced.
Challenges
While running Seamless Parallel, we wanted to ensure that our scorecard ratings (and those of our clients) remained above the USPS requirements thresholds throughout the process. Here’s how we broke it down:
We began by tracking the following potential pitfalls that could affect our USPS scorecard:
- Undocumented mailpieces
- Undocumented IMB codes
- Undocumented pallets
- Mis-shipped pallets
- Duplicate IMB/s within 45 days
- Duplicate 99M numbers for the pallets
- Nesting errors
- gPAF score errors
- By/For errors
During this time, we developed our own software tool to automatically measure and mitigate possible USPS scorecard issues.
Benefits
We have realized a benefit with our just-in-time logistics process realizing some savings.
Get Started!
Although we did experience a few challenges along the way, we found the benefits of Seamless Acceptance made sense for our organization. If you plan to be a part of the commercial mailing business, we recommend you begin by identifying causes for errors in your scorecard. You can get assistance from your Postal Representative or NAPM (National Association of Presort Mailers).
For more in-depth information, you can download our Migration to Seamless Acceptance.
For questions about our experience with Seamless Parallel or Seamless Acceptance, email info@mw-direct.com.
Resources:
See the USPS PostalPro site for more information https://postalpro.usps.com/seamlessacceptactfactsheet
