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CASS Cycle L Frequently Asked Questions
What is the financial impact of CASS™ Cycle L?
Most Pitney Bowes Group 1 Software customers have found that street address validation using DPV will cause 1% to 3% of their mail to no longer qualify for automation discounts. Some mailers may experience much larger drops if their address quality has not been well maintained. Depending on mail class, under the proposed postage rates, this translates into about a five to seven cent postage increase on each piece of mail that no longer qualifies for automation discounts. This can add up to a significant new expense.
Why is the USPS doing this?
The USPS® wants to significantly reduce the amount of “undeliverable as addressed” or “UAA” mail. By requiring mailers to validate addresses with DPV and pay more for mail that will not validate, the USPS will raise revenues to help defray the enormous cost of handling UAA mail (almost $1.9 billion dollars per year) and encourage mailers to adopt addressing practices that will result in better addresses and less UAA.
What if I don’t do DPV?
If you use CASS™ products to qualify for postal discounts you must use DPV to validate street addresses or you will no longer qualify for these discounts. If you use a presort service bureau to sort your mail, they will be using DPV and charging you for each piece that fails to validate. Whatever you are paying per piece for “coding rejects” is also going up when the rate case is implemented later this spring.
Will implementing DPV interfere with performance?
We have completed our first revision of the “DPV Flat File” for z/OS mainframe platforms and are pleased with the results. The CPU time for this file, when compared to a CASS engine running without any DPV process increases by just 19 percent on average. For UNIX and Windows, we are seeing processing performance increase, on average, only 3 percent.
We continue to refine the algorithms on the mainframe and expect the performance to improve even more before our general release in April. To ensure that our performance is sustainable in a variety of environments, we have assembled a list of customers who will be testing the early release later this month.
DPV Flat file will run as our coders do today, offering a process that will verify the records just as your coder codes them today. Whether you are processing the records in batch, appending the master records or not, using Streamweaver to process print runs, etc., the DPV option will be available to support all of these configurations. No change in process should be required.
CASS™ Cycle L Product Audit Assessment
Group 1’s CASS Cycle L Product Audit Assessment is a service helping users of Group 1’s CASS Certified™ software bridge the gap between their CASS software and operating systems to meet the stringent, new USPS® regulatory requirements.
Specifically, the Group 1 Professional Services team provides the following services to ensure compliance with CASS Cycle L:
- Audit and analysis of operations and systems against CASS regulatory requirements
- Evaluation of CASS software configuration deficiencies
- Comprehensive reporting of the assessment
- Actionable recommendations to ensure compliance, reduce costs, and improve performance
Moving Beyond Validation to Correction
For those of you who want to further enhance your address quality, there are strategies you can put in place today.
AEC™ — Address Element Correction is a USPS® program which will attempt to correct addresses with coding errors, including DPV errors and send you the corrections. There is a cost for this service.
AECII™ — Address Element Correction II is another USPS® program to resolve problem addresses but this one electronically distributes the problem addresses to the delivery units so carriers can make the corrections before these corrections are sent back to you. The USPS® charges twenty five cents per correction.
Real-Time Address Validation — If your systems were to validate with DPV each address as it was being entered by your customer service people or staff, you would have many fewer addresses to fix. This is a critical component in reducing the long-term impact of DPV. Most Pitney Bowes Group 1 Software products can operate both in “batch” or “real-time” mode.
Address Quality Hub — Group 1 has recently released the Address Quality Hub, a software product that is driven by your CODE-1 Plus™ or Finalist™ CASS™ engine. In its first release, the Address Quality Hub offers two modules that will not only help you save money today, but better prepare you for CASS™ Cycle L and any future regulation changes.
Delivery Point Correction Module
Based on real customer files, the Correction Module is correcting 25-50% of street address delivery point failures, based on the assignment rules.
Coding Uplift Module
Runs addresses through further cleansing algorithms increasing lift — coding nearly 35% of addresses a single CASS™ engine alone cannot code.