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.