Purpose

This document provides an overview of the end to end process associated with the production and delivery of customised mail in large volumes.

Scope

Some parts of this document are specific to Australia (such as the Australia Post pre-sort lodgement details), but the majority of this document will be useful to audiences from other countries.

This document does not attempt to describe why documents are physically produced. Neither does it attempt to recommend an end-to-end document generation solution. It is intended to provide an 'as-is' description of some of the common practices in use, here within Australia.

Definitions, Acronyms and Abbreviations

BSP Number	Barcode Sort Plan Number.  Identifies a collection of Australian postcodes.
Continuous Feed Printers	Printers which are fed by rolls of paper.
Cut Sheet Printers	Printers which are fed by cut sheets of paper (e.g. A4).
DPID	Delivery Point Identifier.  Identifies a delivery location within Australia.
Enclosure	That which a mailpiece is placed inside of.  E.g. an envelope.
Insertion Control Barcode	A barcode which instructs an Insertion machine.  It provides information such as the number of pages to be included in the enclosure as well as which inserts to be included.
Insertion Machine	A machine which automatically inserts material into an enclosure.
Mailpack	See Mailpiece.
Mailpiece	An item which is to be mailed to a recipient.  E.g. a letter.

Overview

This document is divided in to three main sections. 

Section 2 provides an overview of the technology involved in the mailing process.  In particular, it discusses:

• Printing Technology;
• Enveloping Technology; and
• How mail is delivered.

Section 3 discusses a number of various techniques for the addition of marketing content to mail pieces.

Section 4 provides an overview of the end-to-end process.  It discusses:

• The Sorting and splitting of the print stream;
• The decoration of the print stream such as addition of barcodes and marketing content; and
• Its lodgement for delivery.

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