Pitney Bowes Process Selection

Pitney Bowes contains many divisions; to focus on one division would be in the mail stream, (mailroom division). This division uses the batch flow process for general purpose equipment. An example would be the mail flow from site to site in facilities who contract Pitney Bowes for their services like the mailroom, printers and toners, shipping, accounts payable etc. Another example in the area of accounts payable that describe the batch flow would be invoice payments. It all begins where the mail is picked up in the Post Office then taken to the Pitney Mailroom to the accounts payable employees who extract the mail, edit, audit and batch. From there it's taken to another division who are specified in scanning invoices and is sent to an international country where it gets paid. Pitney Bowes primarily falls into MTS (make-to-stock). The producer specifies the product and customer request it. Any customer can order the supplies and pays for the product, whether it's from postage meter for a pharmaceutical company to a fax machine found in staples. The cell they fall into in the process characteristics matrix would be the batch and Job Shop. Why? Because the make-to-stock would include: Pitney Bowes Divisions, Stores, Companies and the make-to order/assemble-to-order would include: Mailroom, Post Office, Offices. The factors influencing their process selection would be the product flow and the type of customer order. Depending on the product and volumes required by the market effect the process selection. Pitney Bowes has actually adopted one of the methods of mass customization called (postponed). Using the postage meter as an example, lets say it were to break in one of their mailrooms. A new machine would be sent, one of the technicians would customize it whether having to come it and manually do it or with a certain software, as for payments, putting money into the meter for the postage would be through the post office who would provide it through an online system that would go to the machine or one of the mailroom employees manually dialing it on the meter.

Inventory Policy

Pitney Bowes has been able to grow and come up with strategic plans all through innovation, helping its customers create, produce, distribute and manage their mail, documents and packages. Financial Institutions, public utilities and large organizations all call Pitney Bowes when they need machinery that can sort and process mass mailings. So they decided to embark on a global customer service improvement strategy. The plan was to deploy Blackberry Wireless Handhelds built with existing CRM system, with Siebel Field Service and Antenna Software’s A3 solution. The results were better customer and business metrics, granular reporting on product performance to determine where challenges exist, inventory levels lowered by 15%; a 90% reduction in emergency parts order, 10% fewer callback visits, and improved employee access to information that increased productivity. The customer relationship management (CRM) program helps improve the overall customer experience. They wanted to integrate the technical platform to serve their service divisions: Document Messaging Technologies (DMT) and Mail stream Solutions and Services-Americas (MSSA). Businesses worldwide rely on Pitney Bowes high volume mailing systems. The MSSA also includes Multi-Vendor Services which services printers, copiers, multi-function devices, scanners, shredders, PC’s and workstations, mail stream solutions and kiosk devices from a variety of high tech manufacturers. The landscape includes Siebel Field Service for work order management and time and materials billing; SAP for parts and inventory management and contract billing; and Servisgistics for parts planning. IBM WebSphere MQ serves as the messaging middleware and the Antenna Mobility Platform (AMP) provides the mobile application and mobile middleware that integrates with Siebel, SAP and Servigistics. The system provides a simple way for field service technicians to input and retrieve real time information from the Siebel and SAP systems and enable them to link inventory consumption to service activities and products. It improved the inventory management, greater visibility into the field activities from the call center and district offices, improved the first time fix rates and increased service revenue. The AMP service provides full functionality whether in or out of network coverage like update service requests online with actual time tracker, travel and parts usage information. Pitney Bowes saved money by reducing the number of callbacks and shipping costs related to carrying costs.

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