The revolution in the office

Press, 25 May 1977, Page 10

The revolution in the office

Efficiency is becoming the key word in business management as the inflation spiral continues ever upward, eating its way into profits.

With labour costs becoming higher and with the advancement of modern electronics, design, and automation, there are a number of ways that costs can be cut and business efficiency improved. Initial outlays of capital may be high, but without investment for the future no business can thrive.

The days of manual envelope licking, fumbling envelope insertions and letters covered with sometimes overpaid stamps are over.

Automation should not be seen as the ogre which makes office staff redundant, but as a great freeing device which takes away the need for boring, degrading work and frees the staff to do more use-

ful and mentally stimulating work. A basic need in any organisation, regardless of size, is communication. An important part of this is the way in which mailing is handled. An old-fashioned mail operation is not only grossly inefficient to cope with modern needs; it is also bad for the company’s image and results in delayed deliveries, wasted stamps, slow distribution in-house, low morale and high staff turnover. Yet handling the mail is one of the easiest and quickest company operations to streamline. The mail clearance section of a business is the link between business and its market. Christchurch companies may be interested in the range of Pitney Bowes automatic mailing equipment available at Remington’s in Barbadoes Street.

The advantage of equipment such as the Pitney . Bowes range is that it is f modular and may be j pieced together over a 5 period of time as the vol- , ume of mail increases or ’ as the firm’s budget 1 allows. i To start with, there is > the automatic folder and 5 inserter. For an experiment, try 5 folding an invoice tidily, then place it in a window envelope. How long did it v take? An average secref tary takes 15 seconds to do one. That works out at s four a minute or 240 an j hour. Then there is time . wasted when a bored secretary chats with her .. neighbour or takes “time e off” to do her shopping or d to visit the rest room .. . By contrast the Pitney s Bowes automatic inserter e and folder handles about 1- 12 invoices in the time it t takes a secretary to s handle one. The machine can process 40 a minute

and its manufacturers give it a handling capacity of up to 4000 invoices an hour — neatly folded and inserted into envelopes. The machine is equipped with a detection device which prevents multipl efolding and inserting. From October sealed envelopes will cost the same as unsealed to post. This will undoubtedly mean that business firms will prefer to seal all business correspondence, because of the risk of the loss of contents when the cost is the same for the two methods.

If a company is big enough to justify a telephone and a typewriter it will be able to justify stamping mail with a postage meter. Its value cannot be measured in terms of volume and frequency alone. It is the degree of time and cost saving which increases according to the size of the operation which is important, especially when a metre can stamp, seal and stack letters in one sequence. Free advertisements, the company’s address or a message can be printed alongside the franked stamp as an additional benefit. Other devices worth consideration include collating machines which collect different sheets of paper and bring them together; weighing machines to ensure that correct postage is applied to parcels or packages, especially that destined for overseas, and automatic letter opemers.