The problem
Our customer is a large communications company, who invoice their customers monthly. Their billing system outputs individual print billing data with varying numbers of pages. Data protection is imperative to guarantee that their customer’s privacy is constantly maintained. Furthermore the work is time-critical: we must ensure our customer meets their direct debit obligations by providing notice to their customers in advance of payments being collected.
The customer needed a solution to automate the print process of invoices using branded paper for the first page, blank paper thereafter, and envelopment with a high degree of confidence that separate invoices can’t be mixed even though the number of pages varies.
Our solution
Our customer provides us with print ready data. To cope with the varying page numbers we have developed a bespoke script to include a discreet mark on invoices, which our envelopment machine reads.
The script recognises every first page of an invoice and then calculates a mark which, when incorporated into the front pages of the print file, the enveloping machine reads to understand which page it is handling; [1 of 5, 3 of 5, 5 of 5] then [1 of 4, 3 of 4] etc.
Running at a high speed of several thousand items per hour, our envelopment machine knows to stop if ever the sequence is broken – but gently so as not to damage the bills being handled.
Our script processing, printing and envelopment is achieved within approx. two working days and would otherwise take over 125 manual-hours to complete.