Edinburgh College of Art

The Art of Cost Management

Pitney Bowes MeterNet™ technology makes mail management easy

Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) has an international reputation as one of the most successful independent art colleges in the UK. The mailroom handles correspondence with over 1,700 students on a daily basis. The challenge for the ECA mailroom is to manage the post from a number of different departments within the institution and to know how much each one is spending.

ECA needed a solution that would eliminate all of the manual elements involved in collecting, formatting and reconciling mailing data. This would free up the administration staff to spend more time on more productive tasks. Another key consideration was the ability to provide a level of management control to track and analyse the spending of each department, account code or individual as well as offering suggestions as to how that spending could be reduced.

Daniel Watson, College Superintendent who is responsible for a staff of 50 people and in charge of all internal and external mail, needed a cost-effective solution. Daniel had recently leased a *Paragon™ mailing meter from Pitney Bowes as is designed for “high volume, heavy duty” use. The *Paragon™ feeds, seals, weighs, franks and stacks mail of different shapes and sizes in a single automatic operation – at speeds of up to 240 items a minute so was ideal for Daniel who has to send out the mail on behalf of all of the various schools and departments within the college. Finding a product to best manage these costs that would integrate well with the Pitney Bowes Paragon was essential.

Managing costs

“MeterNet™ has proved to be an extremely useful management tool and has helped us reign in our costs,” explains Daniel. “With the accountability and time that MeterNet™ saves us, we can also focus on achieving our objective of clearing all post on a daily basis without having to worry about neglecting the internal administrative duties.”

Complete control

MeterNet is a powerful accounting system that allows ECA to feed data from any number of departments to a single central PC where the data is stored and automatically processed. MeterNet™ has helped ECA to track and monitor postal costs as well as give them the ability to customise formats and reports.

Running under Windows, MeterNet™ takes mail management a step towards full automation. It not only stores ECA’s usage data, but automatically pre-sorts it according to Daniel’s needs – by mail type, operator, date, weight or size of mail, department and account code. Daniel sets the criteria and the system instantly cuts the data accordingly.

ECA has been successfully using the MeterNet accounting system to record all of its different accounting costs on a daily basis for the past nine months:

Success

Daniel comments: “MeterNet™ is user friendly, requires very little training and since installation some months ago it has posed no problems in its operation. Feedback from the various schools and departments has been extremely positive and the postage budget for the college is now workable.”

* Paragon Trademark licensed to Pitney Bowes

The Pitney Bowes Paragon mailing system has now been replaced by the DM900
Mailing System,
pictured above

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