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Central Mailing Invest in Cygnus from The Software Bureau

By |2018-11-06T10:39:57+00:00October 12th, 2017|

About Central Mailing Services Ltd With 60 staff, 3 sites and 25 years under its belt, Central Mailing is a prominent player in the direct mail industry. The £7+ million turnover business provides end-to-end direct mail facilities to predominantly Education, Charity and Performing Arts clients. Richard Morrow, Sales Director of Central Mailing points to a strategy of continuous investment in technology and equipment as the winning formula for prolonged growth. Central Mailing provides complementary data health checks to clients alongside a full range of data processing functions within their in-house data bureau. A team of 10 data professionals process in excess of 70 jobs per day handling everything from the standard deduplication and sortation through to data hygiene work combining [...]

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The Software Bureau Annual Benchmark

By |2017-07-19T09:00:25+00:00July 19th, 2017|

The Software Bureau is the renowned leader in data processing, sortation and Mailmark software. More than 100 organisations rely on Cygnus, SwiftSort and GeMMA as the backbone of their data services function. The business has its roots in the mailing industry where the founders built software for their own data processing needs before branching out to become a software vendor for the rest of the industry. To ensure the business remains acutely focused on those real-world needs of data professionals, The Software Bureau launched their inaugural benchmark customer survey. They asked customers to provide feedback about everything from product capabilities, to support response times and industry trends. The results are in! Why Clients Choose The Software Bureau Over Competitors Two [...]

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Free Online Mailsort Software Arrives 27/03/2017

By |2018-11-06T10:40:18+00:00March 21st, 2017|

Sorting mail to achieve postal discounts is a fundamental activity of every mailing house, print business or corporate print room needing to send bulk mail. It can however be a real rigmarole to get started with sortation. The need to invest in software and expertise for data preparation and artwork manipulation can itself quickly run into the tens of £000’s. This price tag and the complexity for organisations to get into direct mail can be prohibitive. That is why we are introducing MyMailing.co.uk. What is MyMailing? MyMailing.co.uk is a free to use online postal sortation service for all Royal Mail Retail bulk mail discount schemes with the exception of Mailmark (for now). The aim of MyMailing is simple. Make achieving [...]

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Lean DM in the Press – The Print Business

By |2016-12-28T13:36:31+00:00October 25th, 2016|

Gareth Ward, Editor of Print Business magazine visited The Software Bureau last month. The conversation quickly turned to Lean DM and the mission to eradicate waste from direct mail campaigns. Gareth was keen to learn how print businesses and mail producers are profiting from bringing their data services front of house. Click here to read the article from Print Business magazine. Download your copy here Free Introduction to Lean DM To learn more about Lean DM why not download your free 30-page guide. Should you wish to arrange a demonstration of Cygnus or undertake a free trial, please contact us.

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The Software Bureau Continues to Innovate to Revolutionise Bulk Mailing

By |2017-01-12T12:13:29+00:00July 25th, 2016|

Data quality and hygiene specialist, The Software Bureau continues to deliver on its pledge, outlined at the beginning of the year, to improve the direct mail industry by implementing a major upgrade to its Mailmark eManifest management app, GeMMA. The revamped product secures GeMMA’s reputation as the most sophisticated eManifest application available on the market. The new release marks a major landmark in the evolution of Mailmark products as it enables multi-user capability for the first time. This enables any part of the process to be worked on simultaneously by different teams. For example the data team can be creating the manifests at the same time as the account handling team refining the manifest details and uploading them to the [...]

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Open Standard Published for GeMMA to Improve the Mailmark Experience

By |2017-01-12T13:09:15+00:00June 18th, 2016|

In an unprecedented move, The Software Bureau has published the Open Standards for its market leading, Mailmark eManifest management process, GeMMA in a bid to both improve the Mailmark experience and attract more mailers to the bulk mail solution. Mailmark is now the most cost-effective and accountable way for mailers to send bulk mail, however the lack of continuity between application standards has been identified as a barrier. Each software application can have a different standard or data format, resulting in confusion and unnecessary costs being incurred by mailers having to handle manifest data from different sources. By publishing the open standard to GeMMA The Software Bureau provides the industry with a common platform that brings together the different software [...]

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Software Bureau’s Cygnus suite adds 125m records

By |2017-01-12T13:12:30+00:00June 7th, 2016|

The Software Bureau has added 125 million new records to its embedded suppression service within its Cygnus data processing suite. The update follows the REaD Group’s recent upgrade of its data hygiene suite – including the Bereavement Register, the Gone Away Supression File and GAS Reactive – to reach a claimed 100 million records. The refreshed data run through Cygnus provides 29 million new tracked address records and 96 million goneaways. This latest update makes Cygnus the most comprehensive data processing solution available for direct mailers, the company claims. Sitting within Cygnus is the company’s Lean DM workflow package which systematically addresses each of the five sources of waste and highlights opportunities to both optimise mailings and save money. The firm maintains [...]

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The Writing is on the Wall for CBC

By |2017-01-12T14:12:51+00:00March 11th, 2016|

If you haven’t done so already, get on board with Mailmark! If you are a Mail Producer and you aren’t yet offering Mailmark then time is running out. On 4th December last year Royal Mail restated its commitment to phasing out CBC when they announced the findings of their Mailmark migration consultation. Not only did this document confirm the intention to fully withdraw CBC in less than 2 years but it also set the scene for further price increases in January 2017. 1 month after the final nail was hammered into the CBC coffin, Royal Mail announced not 1 but 2 price increases to their Access CBC barcode service. By the end of this month (March) the first increase will [...]

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Introducing Lean DM

By |2017-01-12T14:22:54+00:00January 21st, 2016|

In a study by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) it was found approximately 20 million mail pieces are incorrectly sent each month in the UK. The direct cost of this is said to be between £200 million and £300 million annually. However this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the full cost of poorly executed direct mail campaigns. Incorrectly spelling a valued customer's name, sending the same mailing multiple times and missing recipients altogether when they move house is doing untold damage to brands and the perception of the direct mail industry. That is why The Software Bureau has launched Lean DM, an initiative to help mail producers adopt best practice and deliver superior campaign [...]

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Mailmark drives increased interest in direct mail

By |2017-01-12T14:25:29+00:00December 21st, 2015|

Direct mail has experienced a significant spike in interest and take-up in the last three months. That’s according to market analysis, sales figures and incoming leads from data quality and hygiene firm The Software Bureau. The Software Bureau cites two main contributing factors for this growth: the cost reduction in postage offered by Mailmark and a reduction of client confidence in digital display advertising. Mailmark was introduced by Royal Mail 18 months ago with the aim of making advertising mail more accountable. It is also now the most cost effective way to send bulk mail. In January 2016 a new price differential for Mailmark will be introduced making it up to 5% cheaper than other postage solutions. The Software Bureau [...]

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