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DEATH OF THE AUTOMATABLE SLIM-JIM? NOT SO FAST! 

The following is an article by Steve Lopez for the PostCom Bulletin. Lopez serves as one of PostCom’s representatives on the Postmaster General's Mailers Technical Advisory Committee and as the Standard Mail member of MTAC's leadership team. He serves as a member of the PostCom Board of Directors and its Executive Committee. He currently is employed as the Vice President of Postal Products and Affairs for Experian.  Steve also has patents for tabbing mail and has worked with this mail type for almost two decades now. 

There have been numerous articles published recently that foretell the demise of the “letter-sized booklet” commonly referred to within our industry as a “slim-jim”.  These articles have heaped unfair criticism upon some of the USPS and industry experts who have been working hard to resolve this issue.  Of course, those who have been writing about the demise of the slim-jim have not been part of the industry or USPS teams that are working to identify and resolve problematic issues.  The purpose of this article, then, is to present facts you should know about PostCom's stewardship of its role in this industry effort to resolve the automation challenges presented by slim-jims. 

Some have charged that the Postal Service's role in this effort was simply to remove this kind of challenging mail volume, despite affirmations by the USPS' senior operations vice president, Bill Galligan, that the Postal Service has no desire to see the demise of this letter mail volume.  From where I sit, just about every effort he and his staff have put forth on this matter have indicated their sincerity in seeking a mutually beneficial outcome. One clear point of evidence of this fact was Bill's willingness to reach out to PostCom to marshal its resources to work toward an acceptable resolution to the slim-jim automation challenge.

 If this issue is important to your company, here are some of the things you should know to help you discern the fact from the fiction in what you've read about the slim-jim challenge and the efforts that have been made to help keep this mail volume in the automation letter stream.

Myth One:  Tab type and location are irrelevant:  The size of the tabs used with letter-sized booklets and the materials from which they are made are important factors. So also are the physical locations at which tabs are affixed to these mail pieces.  Tom Potter, USPS engineering, Steve Lopez (PostCom MTAC representative and a member of the PostCom Board of Directors), and Leslie Lenhart of Crosstown Traders who also serves on the PostCom Board, can attest that tab size and location are extremely important determinants for slim-jim automatability.  (Thanks, by the way, to Ms. Lenhart and her company who printed at their own cost many samples of the materials used in recent mail-piece tests.)

Myth Two:  Light weight cover stocks will never work:  Testing has demonstrated that automation is not a problem at all when mail pieces with 50lb cover number 5 were run when tabs of suitable dimensions and physical fixations were applied.  Indeed, testing conducted at the Postal Service's engineering test center clearly demonstrated mail made from 50lb cover (#5) paper stock could processed on DBCSs (Delivery point Bar Code Sorters) without incurring major damage for at least six automation processings. The test piece in question consisted of a 2.5 ounces slim-jim booklet with approximately 56 pages.  Interestingly, similar results were obtained when the mail piece cover stock was fabricated from 60lb cover and consisted of up to 96 digest-sized pages.

Myth Three:  The USPS wants to phase out tabbed pieces:  There is no truth to the assertion that the USPS was trying to eliminate slim-jims from the automated mail stream. In fact, the USPS Operations group and engineering group worked as closely as possible with PostCom and industry representatives to make slim-jim automation testing as complete as possible. Indeed, the testing done thus far is testimony as to the diligence and hard work the USPS was willing to apply to ensure it could retain this mail volume in the automation mail stream. In fact, it agreed quite willingly to employ at its Jacksonville facility the sample mail testing criteria the industry insisted was necessary to produce valid simulations of real-world results.

Myth Four:  The only alternative after the next Federal Register Notice is to move back into the light-weight FLAT category:  This is a kin to saying that the Postal Service sought only to make what should have been an efficient category of letter-mail volume suitable only for more costly handling as flats. The facts, however, speak differently. In fact, testing has shown that if a mail owner is willing to prepare mail for this category to meet newer mail-automation criteria, there is no reason that mail that is similarly configured to these test pieces cannot continue to be mailed at automation letter-mail rates. 

Incidentally, Crosstown Traders' Leslie Lenhart has told the USPS-PostCom work group that her company had been mailing “tabbed” digest and slim-jim sized booklets for the last two decades and that even with new mail piece tabbing standards, she expected virtually no change in mail piece response rates.

Those were the myths. Here are the FACTS that should guide your thinking about slim-jim mail piece design.

  1. 70lb cover paper stock works very well.  Most BULK covers, i.e. 75.3lb Bulk, (which includes “fluff and fillers” on card stocks), however, tend to rip despite the number of tabs used or placement of those tabs.  50 lb and 60 lb cover stocks work well although pieces made from paper cover stocks of 60 lb or more will achieve the best results when tabs are affixed to the locations noted below.
     
  2. If you insist on using lighter weight cover stocks, it is important to put the right size tab in the right locations on the mail piece.  Perforated tabs perform miserably. The is true also for the one-inch tabs or the recommended two tabs specified in current postal regulations.  Keep in mind that present-day USPS tabbing requirements were devised when different the USPS was using sorting equipment that is quite different from the current DBCS models.  The multiple passes and the shorter pass line footprints required of these machines represents a big change from the former straight-pass line of the older generation BCS (Bar Code Sorter) with 96 bins.
     
  3. Be absolutely sure you test your product with USPS Engineering to make sure you are not mailing something that may be problematic.  A process is in place for PostCom members to take advantage of this and share results.
  1. Three tabs work best.  It is best to put two tabs of 1.5 inches diameter on the lead edge of the piece as it will be fed into the machine, with the bottom tab (think the right side perpendicular to the spine when looking at the booklet with the spine down) starting ½” from the spine and the top tab starting 1” from the top edge going down.  The trailing tab (left side) can be 1 ¼” starting within 1” of the top edge. Incidentally, translucent tabs and paper tabs work particularly well.

    Why three tabs?  Without a tab on the lead edge near the bottom of the booklet, the product (any size) when “dog-ear” or rip the cover on the first pass and make further mail processing impossible. The double feed detector damages pieces without the lower lead edge tab, and as it goes through the machine on multiple pieces it jams and causes other problems on the machine.

 So, next time you read another piece on the automation death of the letter-sized booklet, think twice and understand that there is considerable work underway by Postal Service and industry representatives to solve this matter.

In closing, I would like to single out the following persons from the USPS' staff who have worked closely with PostCom in examining this issue: George Laws, Brent Rainey, Thomas Potter and Chris Stratton (as well as many others). Thanks also go to Bill Galligan’s operational team (Krista Finazzo, Barry Walsh) as well as mailing standards (Sharon Daniels, Bill Chatfield and Susan Thomas) and a whole host of PostCom members, who together worked on the simulated live-mail tests that have been discussed in this article.