Have you ever wondered how they print letters with fines from the traffic police or invoices from Rostelecom? To send a letter, you need to print it, buy an envelope and stamps, and spend time going to the post office. And if there are a hundred thousand such letters? And a million?
For mass production of items, there is a hybrid mail - here they print, pack and send correspondence that cannot be delivered electronically. It is enough for the client to transfer information about the recipient and download the text in digital form, we will do the rest.
Today, hybrid mail services are used by public and private companies that send out thousands of items daily. Among them are traffic police, Rostelecom, Sberbank.
Most of the work in the workshops is automated - letters are printed using industrial printers in huge reels and automatically packaged on special lines.
At the same time, the cost of the service remained the same as that of self-delivery. For ordinary letters without tracking, this is 27 rubles 60 kopecks, for registered letters - 64 rubles 80 kopecks.
There are printing facilities in all regions of Russia, so many letters do not go through the stage of regional transportation and are delivered faster.
How hybrid printing works
The work of hybrid mail is provided by 55 printing shops, of which four are large production facilities in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan and Novosibirsk. At these facilities, we can print up to 4 million letters per day.
The client - an individual or an organization - sends us a letter in electronic form. Legal entities upload an archive with pdf files to their personal account otpravka.pochta.ru or transfer data via API through integration with the EPS information system (electronic mail system).
Individuals download letters through their personal account .
The sent files enter the EPS information system, are processed and transferred further - to the automated hybrid mail management system.
We decompose letters received in PDF into json - a simple and understandable format for processing, automatically convert to text and prepare for printing and packaging in envelopes: we place borders, check fonts and the sealing area. We check the recipient's address and index so that the letter goes where it needs to go.
Each shipment has a certain set of data, like a transaction in a bank:
- recipient and sender information
- departure rate
- the weight
- print options for each sheet: XNUMX-sided, XNUMX-sided, paper type, weight
- envelope information: size, number of windows
With the help of this data, we calculate how to rationally use the space on the sheet. To save space, you can use a different layout of the text or vary the types of envelopes - with one, two windows or without them, prepare envelopes with a printed address.
The machine can print a letter on one or both sides of the paper, fold it into an envelope in various ways - Z, P, house. Print the address block on one side of the sheet, and the information itself on the other. Now a person puts the layout data on the machine, but we plan to improve this part of the work too - the data will get to the equipment through an automated hybrid printing control system.
The file for printing, which is sent to the printer after preparation, is a large pdf or afp, in which up to 500 letters are βglued togetherβ.
In small workshops, sheet-fed printers are used, which can print up to two thousand items per day.
sheet printer
Printing in large workshops is automated and occurs in three stages
The first machine takes the file and prints many letters on a roll.
A person removes the reel from the role printer and puts it on the cutter, where the tape is divided into A4 sheets.
At the next stage, the envelope machine folds the sheets in a certain way for packaging and puts them into envelopes. This device can read a special barcode (dataMatrix), by which it understands which envelope to put a certain sheet in. The machine can pack no more than 5 A4 printed sheets into an envelope - hence the limitation on the size of an electronic registered letter.
Ready letters are collected by the workshop employees into boxes, loaded onto trolleys and sent to the post office.
How to use hybrid mail services for your tasks
If you need to send a lot of letters, then you can transfer the functions of preparing, printing, packaging and sending them to Mail. For the sender, each sheet costs money, and these costs are easy to optimize.
The cost of the service consists of two parts - a fee for printing and for forwarding. The price of printing depends on the volume of the order, the number of colors, the method of packaging and other parameters. Shipping costs are the same as regular rates. For each order, an SLA is agreed - the period when the letters must reach the post office. Notifications on the screen and letters about the approaching deadline help us track the time.
Distributed printing
We strive to further reduce delivery time and transport load. To do this, we are working on creating a distributed printing technology that will automatically send print jobs so that letters appear on paper as close as possible to the recipient.
For example, a person violated traffic rules in Moscow, but is registered in Khabarovsk. He will receive a fine from the Moscow branch of the traffic police. Our task is to deliver a letter to Khabarovsk with minimal movement. Instead of printing it in Moscow and sending it to another city by plane or train, we will materialize the shipment in the center closest to the addressee and deliver it with minimal logistics costs.
To receive letters even faster and get rid of correspondence on paper, enable the delivery of letters in electronic form in your personal account .
Source: habr.com