® Mailer’s Technical Advisory Committee Meeting USPS Headquarters Washington, DC November 19 th, 2009

® MTAC WG # 132 Six Sigma Approach to Intelligent Mail Barcode Quality Workgroup Leaders Industry: Don Landis & Susan Pinter USPS: Tim O ’ Reilly

® Six Sigma IMB Best Practices Mission Statement To determine the best practices and work methods that allow for the production of the highest quality Intelligent Mail Barcode, that at a minimum achieves USPS tolerance requirements.

® Tier Definitions I. Experts : Glean best practices from proven IMb mailers. II. Novice : Share best practices, help improve current acceptance rate and gain additional insight from mailers III. Uninitiated : Share and test best practices with mailers Six Sigma IMB Best Practices

® Timelines  August 21st Telecom  September 14th Tier 1 Reviews  September 23rdTelecom  September 28th Tier 2 Reviews  October 9th Telecom  October 16thTelecom  October 23rdFinal reports  October 26thDraft Report to wkg members  October28thDraft Report Comments needed  November 1st Final Report to the MTAC Leaders Six Sigma IMB Best Practices The timeline was very short and extremely quick.

® Identification and Testing Tier 1 Large printers successfully printing IMb 4 sites visited Identified best practices in place Tier 2 Medium printers with limited IMb success 3 sites visited Provided identified best practices and also added newly identified successful practices to previous list Tier 3 Small printers not using IMb or not successful None visited 3 sites identified, pre-testing resulted in 96%-100% performance

® Common Findings All Tier 2 sites brought to mid 90% performance or better Chain transport at print head tightened to manufacturer’s specifications Print head cleaning per manufacturer’s specifications Minimize print head to mail piece surface distance (no more than.25”) Mail pieces guides adjusted properly Fishbone diagram developed listing key factors

® Other Findings Poly bags +90% barcode acceptability on ERM III but MERLIN results <15% Producing acceptable IMb on poly is achievable but readability must be improved Discussions with Engineering and possible separate Lean Six Sigma project Quality Control MERLIN verification is too late in the process to be the quality control measure Establish controls in the printing process prior to acceptance.

® Next Steps Explore engineering opportunities Self-adjusting chains Automatic print head adjustments Poly bag readability enhancements

® Questions ???