18 Oct 2012 Postal Bulletin – Label List changes et al

Well, here we are after the recent announcements about the sale of Postalsoft Presort, and the Postal Bulletins keep on coming. Today’s can be found here.

It’s time for Labeling List changes again, and they were updated Oct 15. These changes may be used immediately but must be used no later than 12/31/2012. In a new twist I’ll come back to in a minute, this list will expire on 1/31/2013. While I can’t see a way to summarize the purpose of these changes, there are at least some cases that seem to fall in the category of moving processing from smaller outlying facilities to cities that appear to be larger or more centralized. For example, a couple 3-digit ZIPs in Kentucky listed in L002 will all share the city name of Lexington, KY instead of their previous smaller-city names. Those would be Somerset and Hazard (I think “The Dukes of Lexington” just doesn’t have quite the same ring to it :-).

These Label List updates will be incorporated into our November directory file updates.

The other DMM revision that seems to matter to Presort is “New Pallet Preparation Standards for Periodicals,” Essentially this allows for placing bundles of PER flats on mixed ADC and origin Mixed ADC (OMX) pallets, with no minimum pallet weight limit; however, preparation of each is required when there are

100 pounds of mail for the pallet level. Presort can already comply with these rules, so at most you may want to verify your setup, for example if you have the minimum OMX and MADC pallet weights set to 100 when you’d really like them to be at 0.

The other DMM revisions do not seem to affect our Presort software, although they will apply to certain mailer’s practices:

• Foreign Trade Regulations, Electronic Filing for Domestic Mailpieces — Clarification

• Modifying References to Automated Export System “Proof of Filing Citation” and “Exemption and Exclusion Legend”

You might also be interested in “Elimination of Certain Quick Service Guides.” Evidently, according to the text of the short article, some QSGs either describe a preparation that is so complicated they no longer feel comfortable providing a brief summary of the rules, or they describe something that is already brief in the DMM so they feel it is not worth including an entry as a QSG. If you disagree with their list and appreciate any of the QSGs they plan to remove, you can send an email as explained in the article.

OK, finally back to the bit about Label Lists. And if you want the full information from the USPS’s perspective you can find the links to the various documents describing these changes on RIBBS here.

Starting with the next Label List update, how the USPS handles the transitions between published Label Lists is changing, and rather dramatically. Right now, as you know, at any given time there is a set of Label Lists available online at pe.usps.gov (Postal Explorer). Roughly every two months, updates are published that apply to those lists. They are effective and may be used immediately, but they _must_ be used for mailings being entered beyond 75 days after that publication, just like the changes that were published a few days ago on 10/15 _must_ be used by 12/31. Really this means there is a 75-day “window” where either the old or the new list may be used.

Starting with the Label List update being published in December, that will all change. In short, the data published in mid-December will not be valid for use until January 1, and then there will be just a 30-day window to convert from the old lists to the new data (see the note about the current changes expiring on 31 Jan 2013). One would hope this makes for more efficient mail handling by the USPS, since they won’t have nearly so much time with different valid labelings, but it is sure to be an adjustment. On our end, we are working out how to have those updates available earlier than our historical mid-month availability. Ideally, assuming we can get all the required postal data in time, we want to have the January directories available at the beginning of January. We realize that some mailings being prepared early in January may not be entered until February when the new list _must_ be used.

That’s the overview of the coming changes, certainly there will be more info about it coming as we get more into the USPS’s implementation of the changes.