Advanced Mailing and Data Transformation System

Bridson & Horrox

Project Brief

Design a generic system to help with the day to day operation of the Direct Mailing Division. The system should use Excel as its primary interface and needs to provide the following functions:

Job control and management
Audit services and reporting for both client and internal use
Postal zoning of address information
Address cleaning functions
Name transformations (Shorting names, all upper case, joint holders, etc.)
Handle hold instructions in the correct manner
Identify potential duplicates
Random address salting (to assist with 3rd part auditing/quality control)
Proof of concept for Neopost Integration providing OMR (Optical Mark Reader) support
Additionally, the system should be easy to use for the user supporting both ad-hoc jobs and standard tasks where a fixed data exchange format has been agreed in advance.

Solution Implemented

The solution we chose for this project was to create three distinct areas of functionality; the first and most important was the creation of a standard "back-end". This back-end system implemented as a series of DLLs and custom controls wraps all the job control, audit and data transformation functions in a reusable form.

Next, we had to implement a custom Excel add-in to expose the functionally previously built in the shared back-end DLL and controls. Additional client validation and warnings (using colour coding to allow the operator to visualise issues with data sets better) were then added to complete the Excel portion of the project.

The final delivery was a proof of concept application providing support for the Neopost OMR marks using a pre-defined data set. The application for this was developed as a standard Windows Forms solution again built atop the shared back-end system. This application, when provided with the correct data, is capable of parsing, zoning, setting OMR marks and applying the selected data transformations to thousands of documents a minute.

What The Client Thought

Antelle have delivered a first class solution enabling us to focus on what we do best - providing a quality product and service to our clients. Our clients demand the highest quality error free service and with the system provided by Antelle we now have the tools to ensure that we deliver that quantifiable error free service.

I have no hesitation in recommending Antelle.