Hello everyone,
I hope this is the right forum for my inquiries about CASS and Presort.
I'm an industry consultant specializing in VDP. A client who has been producing VDP postcards recently asked me to look into both CASS and Presort software packages as they want to look at doing the mailing work in-house (they use a 3rd party mailhouse to do list processing for CASS and Presort now).
I know a bit (I'm by no means an expert, though) about CASS and Presort but was looking for some advice from users out there on some packages to take a look at. My client wants to utilize his .NET developers and add this CASS and Presort capability to his custom developed Web to Print storefront that currently accepts customer VDP orders. So we are looking for Server-based software with .NET API's that can be installed in a clustered environment.
The .NET interface should allow for full automation of the CASS and Presort process including making the Mail.dat file, postage statements, and tray tags available for download. If there was a way to query what the bad addresses were (which we may then allow people to "fix" online or at least view them), that would be excellent as well.
Speed is quite important. My client has a handful of rather large customers on his system now but has plans to hire a whole new digital sales team to signup new customers. The IT director wants to make sure that the solution can be scaled to handle some pretty high loads - say 20 lists, each at 250,000 records concurrently processed. Or, 100 lists at 5,000 records average each. Assuming that there is some queuing going on, concurrent processing in a load balanced environment across multiple cores/CPUs/servers is interesting.
In my limited research, I've seen that BCC looks to be a popular option in the industry for small to mid-level workflows but does it have the .NET API's and does it scale like we need it to? I was also quite interested in the CODE-1 Plus and Mailstream Plus solutions for this. Does anyone have any experience with those packages? Satori also seems to be another standout but how powerful is their server technology?
Further, I was thinking about possibly recommending a phased implementation for my client and suggest that a Phase 1 be to implement just the CASS solution first. This first phase would ensure that his workflow is dealing with clean, deduped, and valid address data . This is very desirable as it allows him to provide accurate pricing and list counts at order time to customers that upload lists to his Web to Print interface when ordering an item as well as validate single entry addresses that customers enter for shipping/billing.
If we chose a Phase 1 CASS-only implementation, is there then a "poor-mans" Presort algorithm (like simple sort on ZIP, ZIP+4, or ZIP+4+DP) we could utilize to that CASS processed data in lieu of running it through a full PAVE certified Presort package in order to get some level of discount on standard and first class mail? What, then, would be the added benefit of implementing full PAVE Presort as a Phase 2? If we can get 90% of where he wants to be without PAVE (remember - he will have huge cost savings by not farming this work out to a mailhouse), we will almost certainly go this phased approach.
Sorry for all the questions but thanks in advance for any info anyone can provide!
John
I hope this is the right forum for my inquiries about CASS and Presort.
I'm an industry consultant specializing in VDP. A client who has been producing VDP postcards recently asked me to look into both CASS and Presort software packages as they want to look at doing the mailing work in-house (they use a 3rd party mailhouse to do list processing for CASS and Presort now).
I know a bit (I'm by no means an expert, though) about CASS and Presort but was looking for some advice from users out there on some packages to take a look at. My client wants to utilize his .NET developers and add this CASS and Presort capability to his custom developed Web to Print storefront that currently accepts customer VDP orders. So we are looking for Server-based software with .NET API's that can be installed in a clustered environment.
The .NET interface should allow for full automation of the CASS and Presort process including making the Mail.dat file, postage statements, and tray tags available for download. If there was a way to query what the bad addresses were (which we may then allow people to "fix" online or at least view them), that would be excellent as well.
Speed is quite important. My client has a handful of rather large customers on his system now but has plans to hire a whole new digital sales team to signup new customers. The IT director wants to make sure that the solution can be scaled to handle some pretty high loads - say 20 lists, each at 250,000 records concurrently processed. Or, 100 lists at 5,000 records average each. Assuming that there is some queuing going on, concurrent processing in a load balanced environment across multiple cores/CPUs/servers is interesting.
In my limited research, I've seen that BCC looks to be a popular option in the industry for small to mid-level workflows but does it have the .NET API's and does it scale like we need it to? I was also quite interested in the CODE-1 Plus and Mailstream Plus solutions for this. Does anyone have any experience with those packages? Satori also seems to be another standout but how powerful is their server technology?
Further, I was thinking about possibly recommending a phased implementation for my client and suggest that a Phase 1 be to implement just the CASS solution first. This first phase would ensure that his workflow is dealing with clean, deduped, and valid address data . This is very desirable as it allows him to provide accurate pricing and list counts at order time to customers that upload lists to his Web to Print interface when ordering an item as well as validate single entry addresses that customers enter for shipping/billing.
If we chose a Phase 1 CASS-only implementation, is there then a "poor-mans" Presort algorithm (like simple sort on ZIP, ZIP+4, or ZIP+4+DP) we could utilize to that CASS processed data in lieu of running it through a full PAVE certified Presort package in order to get some level of discount on standard and first class mail? What, then, would be the added benefit of implementing full PAVE Presort as a Phase 2? If we can get 90% of where he wants to be without PAVE (remember - he will have huge cost savings by not farming this work out to a mailhouse), we will almost certainly go this phased approach.
Sorry for all the questions but thanks in advance for any info anyone can provide!
John
