Services

Printing business critical documents such as invoices, statements and letters is a core element of PHD Mail. It’s what we do. It’s what we’ve been doing successfully for over 20 years.

We take your mail & billing data and create specific and client unique documents in a professional, efficient and secure environment.

We will re-design your documents to make them work harder and better for you. We’ll also help you turn your bills and statements in to marketing tools by using designated “white space management” (blank areas on bills etc.) to carry customer specific messages which can change to suit your company needs.

We will ensure 100% accuracy and security of each and every mailing, utilising the latest OMR (Optical Mark Recognition) technologies and we will send you Management Information System reports to suit your requirements. We’ll also send you reports based on all aspects of the SLA, again meeting your needs.

Where we can, and where you want us to, we can group not only files of a similar kind, e.g. invoices, but we will also group different files for the same customer together. For example, we can group a statement and an invoice in to the same envelope where specific parameters are met, address, account number etc. This helps to reduce postage costs as a single envelope can be sent instead of 2, and it also reduces processing costs so you benefit twice.

You might require exception rules applying to some of your customer’s mail. Here for example, you might want all mail for certain branches being sent to the head office; or you might want some invoices printing but returning to you. Whatever exceptions you require, we’ll work with you to meet your requests.

Because this is what we do for a living, you’d expect to see some cost benefits. You’d be right! Our clients have enjoyed real savings of up to 30% on document processing alone; and there’s even more to be had! We will manage all stock and stationery purchasing on your behalf so you take full advantage of PHD Mail’s bulk purchasing power. We will supply all stationery, both cut sheet and continuous, all envelopes and any inserts, leaflets and booklets you may want to include.

And we haven’t even talked about postage yet! Using our Downstream Access partner, TNT, we’ve reduced our clients annual postage bills by an average of 20%! Please click here to calculate your postage……..

At PHD Mail we are absolutely dedicated to helping our clients, both new and existing, to get the best possible postage prices. We work very closely with the UK’s two biggest postal authorities, Royal Mail and TNT UK, to ensure every possible discount is made available to you.

Before a single item has been posted we will work with you and Royal Mail to ensure your address lists are up to date, accurate and fully postcoded. We will make sure that your clients addresses comply with Royal Mail’s Cleanmail® and Mailsort® service guidelines. What’s more, we will do this free of charge!

Once we’ve done this and we’ve started to print your business critical letters, bills, invoices or statements, and they are ready to be posted, we will use our own PHD Mail postage account to give you further benefits. By utilising TNT UK’s DownStream Access service, PremierSort2 – a definite 2 day delivery service – we will dramatically reduce your postage bills. Depending on your annual mailing volume, PHD Mail can save you on average, a very substantial 20%.

We invest in the latest technology so you don’t have to. Our latest piece of kit is a Letter Sorting Machine that allows us to consolidate the mailings of our clients that don’t individually reach the required volume level to qualify for Royal Mail’s Mailsort® discount service. By consolidating mailings from various clients, we can ensure the minimum Mailsort® volumes are achieved and this allows us to pass on discounts to clients.

The method of communicating with your customers is evolving; traditional print and mail is increasingly being replaced by electronic delivery. The e-billing of documents negates the postage element of delivery which can be over 70% of the cost of the production and delivery of a bill or letter. In addition to cost saving, there are speed and traceability benefits as well.

PHD can provide e-billing in a number of ways, pushing via email, retrieving through a customised portal or full integration for retrieval through your own customer intranet. Our e-billing service can work side by side with the traditional print and mail to help facilitate the transition to electronic delivery.

In addition to e-billing PHD is able to offer archive retrieval services through a portal for all documents produced, which can be accessed for producing copy documents in printed form or emailing to a customer etc. This facility is used by a number of credit control departments and can also link documents such as printed invoices against scanned proof of deliveries in order to help reduce the effort of query management.

Electronic Post on Demand (EPOD)

• The EPOD solution has been created for your day-to-day, non-bulk documents which are normally created, printed, manually enclosed and manually mailed out from your office
• Types of documents sent via EPOD include, but are not limited to:
  • Single or multi-page letters, with or without A4 inserts / flyers
  • Mail-merge documents, single or multi-page, with or without A4 inserts / flyers
  • Black or full colour mixed printing
  • One sided (simplex) or double sided (duplex) printing
  • PDF documents created from multiple platforms

Process:

• Once your documents have been created locally, they are simply printed to the EPOD print driver
• The EPOD print driver will then launch a web browser which gives you the chance to proof your documents before they are automatically released, via secure FTP (File Transfer Protocol), to PHD Mail
• This process takes place all day, every day for all documents printed to PHD Mail by your business:
  • Access to EPOD is password controlled so you can monitor who has use of the system
• The creator of any document has access to the system via the internet so that they can delete any documents, if required, throughout the day
• At an agreed time after 18:00, PHD Mail will process all documents created by your business and print, enclose and mail out the very next working day
• The EPOD reporting mechanism provides detailed reports by department and user so that usage can be closely tracked, and cost can be allocated to the right areas of your business
• PHD Mail will consolidate your EPOD daily mail with other users of the system to take advantage of volume related discount postal rates

Benefits:

• Using EPOD will provide the following benefits:
  • Lower postage and stationery costs
  • Elimination of internal printer maintenance and consumable costs
  • Freeing up of your staff to concentrate on their jobs rather than printing letters and stuffing envelopes
• Set-up is speedy and requires minimal to zero IT resource
• There are no volume or quota commitments so you will receive the same discounted rates irrespective of the volume that you produce on any one day

Data security:

• All documents sent via EPOD are processed in line with PHD Mail’s accreditations:
  • ISO 27001 (data & physical security)
  • ISO 14001 (environmental concerns)
  • ISO 9001 (operational quality standards)
• PHD Mail is registered with the Data Protection Registrar and shall apply the procedures set out in its Company Quality Manual (ISO 9001-2008 accredited) to the processing of Data to ensure compliance with the requirements of the Data Protection Act 1998 and Telecommunications Act 1999

Call us on 01283 512733 and ask for Suzanne Thompson or Tom Limburn for more information.

Click here to view our EPOD – process flow

We are dedicated to giving the best possible Business Critical Mail & Transactional Billing services to our clients. We are also committed to ensuring we have business tested solutions in place when there’s a change to normal, day-to-day production. To minimise any disruption to our service, we have a 2nd site situated just a few miles away from our main production site.

Our 2nd site situated in Stretton on the outskirts of Burton upon Trent, is a fully operational unit used on a daily basis for live work. Here, we continually update and back-up data from the main site to our duplicate servers and we also keep sufficient stationery, inserts and envelopes for all our clients, should an unexpected need arise.

Having a 2nd site is also extremely useful, not only as a DR contingency, but also when our clients require extra capacity, especially during busy periods. We can simply expand our production capacity to meet often very tight timescales.

Customer Confidence

It’s all well and good talking about DR and BC but how do we know it will work when an incident occurs? Simple; we test it regularly for all our clients. On a given date, we decamp; we move all our production from the main site to the 2nd site and complete a minimum of one full working day’s production. Only by doing this can we be totally confident that our robust planning and systems work.

So, should PHD Mail need extra capacity, we’ve got it close by. We know it works because we use it daily and, unlike some Disaster Recovery solutions, PHD Mail manage and control its own solution.

Another client driven service provided by PHD Mail is scanning. During a client review in 2007 a business critical need for documents to be scanned and linked was identified and, although back then it wasn’t a service PHD Mail provided, it was quickly acknowledged as a service we could and should provide. Scanning is now an integral part of our E-Solutions package offering clients an opportunity for documents such as Delivery Notes, Purchase Orders and Packing Notes etc. to be electronically linked to other documents such as Invoices or Statements.

We also provide a back office scanning service where previously archived paper documents can be taken in bulk, indexed, scanned and converted in to a PDF document for electronic archiving. Documents can be scanned up to A3 in size and can be simplex or duplex. Doing this provides much faster and easier access to archived documents and requires much less manual intervention and storage space.

So how does it work?

We can arrange for collection of documents or they can be couriered to us – we can arrange this too – at intervals to suit your requirements. All documents are then scanned following pre-determined criteria, for example:

• batch header
• invoice / account number etc

When all documents in a specific batch have been scanned, we upload the documents in a PDF format for you and / or your customers to view. Once the upload is complete, a reconciliation report including the following information will be forwarded to you:

• Date
• Customer
• Unique box ID
• Scanned batch number
• Number of scanned images
• Preparation & Scanning time
• Team member´s initials

Linking the Scanned Images

Where PHD Mail has received data and created either a printed document or an E-document, for example an invoice or a statement, it’s simple to create a link from these to the scanned document. Usually the documents will be linked by an account number or customer number for example, or by customer or account name. We can match by parameters to suit your requirements.

When you retrieve a document or group of documents from the archive, you’ll see a link that shows further documents are available and these can be opened with the primary document(s). You can also allow your customer’s access to linked documents, the choice is yours.