Toronto and London, 16 October 2008. Crawford Technologies Inc., the award-winning provider of TransPromo and transactional document and mailing solutions, today announced the launch of Enterprise IMB Mail Piece Tracker, a software product designed to manage mail piece tracking information enabled by the new USPS Intelligent Mail barcode (IMB). Using Mail Piece Tracker companies can effectively track their correspondence throughout the postal system and thereby improve customer service, optimize mail processing and affect a number of business process improvements.
 
Enterprise IMB Mail Piece Tracker is a server-based database solution that captures and utilizes mail piece tracking data provided by unique identifiers included in the IMB barcodes. The solution gets installed on the organization's servers, and allows full access and control of the database. A variety of supplied reports and a custom report generator provide enterprise users with easy access to the information.
 
Once a company has implemented IMB Full Service, and taken the necessary steps to establish unique identifiers for each mail piece, Mail Piece Tracker provides a much-needed capability to track and manage that information in ways that are beneficial to its business. "The Postal Service allows you to do tracking, but they don't provide the facilities to make it easy," says Ernie Crawford, President of CrawfordTech. "Mail Piece Tracker provides users with extensive views of the raw data to allow organizations to manage their operations more efficiently".
 
As mail travels through the postal delivery system each piece gets scanned periodically along the way. This generates a tracking entry that gets sent back to the original mailer. Mail Piece Tracker automatically captures this information, uploads it into a database, and makes that data available in real time. Companies can then verify when a customer communication was delivered, to whom, to what address and when a response is on its way back where applicable.  This intelligence allows for making a variety of operational improvements.
 
According to Stephen D. Poe, VP of Product Management for CrawfordTech, a new world of advanced ADF capabilities open up with Mail Piece Tracker. "CrawfordTech's experience in document and mail production gives us an advantage launching Mail Piece Tracker since customers can implement and run the solution in-house. We allow you to retain control and security of sensitive data and optimize the integrity and efficiency of your internal production processes."
 
Other benefits of Mail Piece Tracker include the ability to automate address corrections by allowing users to capture USPS OneCode ACS notifications as they become available, automate database updates, and mitigate the cost of returned mail. Mail Piece Tracker functions as a key component of document optimization and re-engineering efforts to take best advantage of emerging technologies such as IMB.