C. Clint Bolte & Associates

The thirteenth annual fulfillment conference sponsored by the Mailing and Fulfillment Service Association was originally slatted for last September but was postponed due to hurricane Isabelle. The April 2-4 weekend gathering still drew 108 attendees to Boston, including nearly 20% first timers. This historic city provided the backdrop for an industry that has also had a strong history as well. Tours and presentations highlighted how important customer service has been to every successful third party fulfillment (3PF) vendor down through the years. While technology tools and client expectations for quicker responses have and continue to change fulfillment operations, the leading vendors still attest to the importance and value of managing client relations.

The traditional first day tours of innovative practitioners' actual operations continue to be one of the conference highlights. Attendee comments throughout the rest of the conference often referred to something observed during the tour. The FleetBoston Financial Services mailing and fulfillment facility and two of W.A. Wilde's three plants were the tour venues.

FleetBoston, soon to be part of Bank of America, occupied 80,000 square feet and represented one of four of their New England locations. This facility's entire operations staff was outsourced to Pitney Bowes Mailing Management Services on a five-year contract. The fulfillment group had eight fulltime employees and lot of temps to deal with a regular spike of assembling the customized financial transaction packages the first five days of each month. This fulfillment group handles more than 500 companies dividend reinvestment plans (DRIPS). The U-shaped corrals standing six feet tall for manual sorting all had plexi-glass backings behind the shelves so that all activities could be easily observed. Kathy Hegarty, Fleet's Fulfillment Manager, remarked on their successful use of Airborne's "Flight Ready" bags. These pre-paid courier pouches were helpful as there was no charge back for slight errors on addresses when the package could still be delivered. These chargebacks are common by FedEx and UPS.

Their mailing operation had two Bell and Howe high speed, pre-sorting units - a Criterion & a JetStar 3000 - running multiple shifts processing 500,000 first class letters a day with a capacity of two million a day. USPS placed a MERLIN on site in November that just went live in February 2004. There is 100% security screening of everything coming into this facility. This is performed by an L3 Communications Security & Detection System, which cost $65,000 and is manned by three people. There is no noticeably delay in getting inspected product into normal workflows according to Fleet management.

Founded in 1868 and now under fifth generation family management, W.A. Wilde Company has 425 full time employees in three different New England plants. Forty percent of their current business is full service fund raising packages for non-profits with the balance of the business split between fulfillment and direct mail. They offer some of the most sophisticated closed loop response management services to high tech clients. Wilde offered one of the first web-based order entry systems in 1998, trademarked eZOrders, which tie into their Wilde Inventory System (WIS). CEO Tom Wilde described their client-branded web sites, utilizing eZOrders™ for on line ordering, as being "very Amazon-like."

Wilde's extensive kitting operations are based upon production sets of 10 followed by one sampled QC check; hence, quality assurance involves a 10% sample of all kits. Order picking employees follow standardized procedures throughout the warehouse regardless of client. And yet packers are assigned to each client because packing specifications are often client unique.

Warehouse receiving standard operating procedures include a customer agreed upon count methodology, e.g., 1-2 boxes/skid or a weigh count average, a two hour dock-to-stock target, and location in client specific storage areas.

Robert Reeder, Wilde's CIO, described the data and information flow-charting by product and service. He remarked, "There is critical data exchange between our built and bought software systems." Their on demand technology philosophy has these key components: (1) rules based, (2) data rather than document centric, (3) document self assembly to accentuate the one to one marketing objectives, (4) on line proofing via PDFs, and (5) support for various foreign languages. Their future IT vision includes (1) interactive (HTML) documents, (2) collaborative design features, and (3) total data driven document creation.

To support this market driven strategy nearly 15% of all employees are part of the IS/IT package plus another 27 account managers and 6 sales people. Tom Wilde prefers to invest in proven software packages but needs proprietary IT programming expertise to assure that data moves among the applications and corporate infrastructure, including eZOrders and WIS, smoothly and efficiently.

There are a dozen in-bound telemarketers with more than 200 home keyers, who are paid per "correct" piece, for populating template driven databases on the web. An out-bound telemarketing team has a contract to call college students to convince them to consolidate their student loans. Personalized kits then printed and compiled go out to each student.

Digital printing is done on eight roll fed OCE Pagestream units, five Canon Imagerunners, and a pair of Xerox 6060s. All binding is done off-line by two Bourg BB3001 perfect binders and other stitching, collating, or inserting units.

Wilde has seven full time maintenance personnel who rebuild their inserters and other various finishing machines as required. Their MERLIN unit installed in December is expected to sample the work from the expected 16,000 postal forms submitted reporting on the 293 million pieces mailed and postage expenses of $57 million.