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created through litho offset printing, Schipke reports. Flexo also has a portion of the market, albeit a smaller one, and is often used in long-run transactional printing of bills due to the low cost of production. "Now you're transitioning that technology, with its different characteristics that have to be dealt with from a marketing position," Schipke says. "The market has to understand and accept that, when we start talking about a singular inline process. You're now moving from buying a pre-printed envelope printed on flexo or litho and inserting content and changing to this newer technology, inkjet." Driving the change is that the market is seeking ways to make mail more competitive with its electronic counterparts, which means making it faster. "People want to drive out cost, react more quickly, and introduce variable printing technologies never before encompassed into the mailstream," he says. "When you say, 'I need variable data as part of the envelope,' you're bringing in variable data technology, which in turn brings in inkjet technology." The technology is not for every organization, given a price tag that is well in excess of $1 million. But medical, banking, direct mail, and other industries using high volumes of mail are interested in its ability to reduce costs. Pitney Bowes Mailstream Wrapper Among the leaders in this technology is Pitney Bowes, whose Mailstream Wrapper allows users to take a single piece of paper, build the envelope, and wrap it around a document. "We have a term called the White Paper Factory," says Grant Miller, vice president of global strategic product management, Document Messaging Technologies. "The concept is you buy white rolls of paper, and have a minimum amount in The RISO Mailing Solution R iso is the frst company to attempt to bring inline envelope conversion technology downstream. Two parts comprise the Riso Mailing Solution: the ComColor 9050—a 150 ppm, full-color, cut-sheet inkjet printer—and the inline Wrapping Envelope Finisher. The Mailing Solution streamlines the steps of mail production, reducing labor hours and capital investments for further savings. It can print and address an envelope form and enclosures, fold the enclosures, create an envelope from the printed form wrapped around the enclosures, and seal the envelope inline to produce a fnished mail piece. The ComColor is well-suited for transaction applications, according to RISO. As part of the Mailing Solution, it lets customers effectively print, insert, and seal mail pieces inline for increased productivity and mail integrity, condensed into a single compact system. your inventory. You print the document online on one roll. On the other roll you either have white paper you wrap around as the envelope, spraying the address on later with inkjet, or you have a windowed envelope that allows the document's address to show through that envelope window. You carry the minimal amount of inventory, and allow yourself to co-mingle jobs." By contrast, typical mailers might have several hundred envelopes carried in inventory, and an equal number of rolls of pre-printed paper. Instead of a two-step process involving carrying considerable inventory, it's done in one step. With the Mailstream Wrapper, you have the ability to not only build an envelope around the document and eliminate the inventory, but to personalize printed messages on the inside of the envelope, and print the outside of the envelope with unique messages, branded offers or special promotions. While the Mailstream Wrapper can support a variety of needs and volumes, the biggest benefit comes from volume mailers or businesses that can co-mingle jobs, Miller says. Incepture, the wholly-owned subsidiary of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida, is an example of a mailer using the Mailstream Wrapper as part of its growth strategy to gain more volume, he adds. Incepture has replaced five printers and seven inserters with two Pitney Bowes IntelliJet 20 Printing Systems and two Mailstream Wrapper Productivity Series. The benefits derived include reduced inventory, higher productivity resulting from reduced machine delays, and lower costs, Miller reports. The system requires output management software, which normalizes the jobs so they can be run consistently, regardless of print platform, and permits co-mingling of jobs. That allows, for example, the next 15 jobs to be run in ZIP code sequence as one large job run at full productivity, rather than 15 small jobs, each involving makeready, waste, set-up time, and stoppages. "As one big job, you can run them as if scale, even if you don't have scale," Miller says. As for a learning curve, count on the typical amount of training an operator would be required to master on any new machine, he adds. "Operators come to Pitney Bowes, and in some cases we come to them," he says. "They learn how to set up the machine, operate the software to (continued on page 26) Pitney Bowes Mailstream Wrapper Productivity Series is one example of the type of equipment spurring the mailing industry's next revolution. w w w. M y P R I N T R e s o u r c e . c o m July 2013 / QUICK PRINTING 13