Statement Processing Fuels Savings Carroll Independent Fuel Company in Baltimore provides heating oil and other petroleum products to 30,000 residential and business clients. Several times a month, employees process invoices and statements. "The people that were asked to do that have other duties," says Dan Cahill, vice president of sales for Webb/Mason, a Hunt Valley, Md.-based distributorship. "So their other jobs were put on hold for statement processing." The task wasn't simple. The statements varied: Some clients wanted bimonthly ones, while others asked for budget statements to spread their payments evenly over 12 months. Also, the laser printer Carroll used to process the statements sometimes malfunctioned, adding days to the cycle, increasing maintenance costs and limiting the fuel company to a generic statement. "They had to design forms around the limitations of their equipment," Cahill says. After employees processed the statements in house, they placed them in mail trays and sent them to another company to sort and deliver to the post office. Carroll discovered the statements weren't being sorted properly. "They weren't optimizing postal discounts," Cahill says. It was on this point—postal discounts—and a few others that Webb/Mason earned the fuel company's statement processing business last year. Webb/Mason brought in National Data Services (NDS) to make a presentation on statement processing. NDS is a Chicago vendor specializing in direct marketing, statement processing and database management. The distributorship and manufacturer showed Carroll how co-mingling its statements—mailing them by ZIP code in bulk with other mail processed by NDS—could save the fuel company 6 cents per piece, or approximately $1,700 a month. In addition, NDS' solution would improve Carroll's cash flow because statements would be processed and mailed more quickly. "Previously, statements would sit for a few days before they mailed, and that means cash," says Jim Renella, vice president of NDS. "Cash is king." In addition, customers now send payments to various regional lock boxes rather than remit payments to the fuel company. The bank retrieves payments from the lock boxes, so Carroll has access to funds in its account more quickly. Carroll's CFO was sold on the statement processing system, Cahill says. During Carroll's busy season, from October through April, NDS receives daily invoice and statement information from the fuel company via FTP transmission. NDS uses an electronic form template to create the statements and invoices, then prints and mails them within three business days. NDS maintains a 3-month supply of forms and envelopes, and Webb/Mason stores a larger quantity at its Chicago warehouse. Each month, NDS sends Carroll a CD-ROM of back data embedded with exact images of the statements and invoices it processed and mailed. This archiving system is helpful when statements are lost. "Carroll can pull that data and resend it to customers immediately," Cahill says. The statement processing system has other benefits: It reduced soft costs, such as the time Carroll's employees previously spent on bill processing. Also, it reduced the number of statement pages because NDS duplex-images the documents and eliminated remittance stubs on every page. Also, Carroll now can selectively market to segments or all their customers by inserting buck slips in the mailings. "The driver in all this was the technology," Cahill says. "The CFO of Carroll wanted to make sure the vendor was reputable and the data was accurate." NDS provided beta testing for a few months to ensure the CFO that the system would work. It did. Now, Webb/Mason is educating all its sales reps in the Washington D.C./Baltimore area about statement rendering, using Carroll Independent Fuel Company as a success story. Have a solution? Click here to be featured as an E-Weekly Solution of the Week