JETVision solution aids Aspen Marketing Services
with high-speed matching capabilities

Aspen Marketing Services, with headquarters in Chicago, IL, is a leading full-service marketing company with locations across the US. Aspen Marketing provides services for the automotive, telecom, financial, retail and manufacturing industries. With more than 23 years experience, Aspen Marketing has evolved from being a direct marketing provider to the automotive industry to offering fully integrated marketing and communications services to a wide variety of clients. These services include direct mail, event marketing, public relations and database analytics, and assist companies with their marketing efforts.

Business challenges

Pat O’Rahilly, President/CEO
Aspen Marketing Services

At its Chicago facility, Aspen Marketing handles approximately 2,000 unique jobs and 7.5 million mailpieces each month. Business was growing ahead of schedule, and Aspen Marketing realized that it needed to expand the list of capabilities and services for clients. Many of the new jobs required two or more items to be matched together in one mailing—however the opportunity to automate these applications would alleviate outsourcing and reduce cost. Aspen Marketing chose the JETVision solution from Bell and Howell to meet this requirement.

Before implementing the JETVision solution, smaller jobs requiring matching services were handled in-house by a team of temporary workers, which proved to be very slow and very costly. Temporary workers were costing hundreds of dollars each day, and every matched mailpiece was taking well over 12 seconds on average to assemble. Higher-volume jobs were also a challenge; they were outsourced and profitability was impacted. "Our business was growing faster than our infrastructure, and we were challenged with coming up with ways to get work done in a timely and cost-effective manner," said Denny Dee, Vice President of Production Services. "I had experience with the benefits and results from using JETVision, and knew that JETVision was one of the keys to our successful growth."

New solutions

In 2008, Aspen Marketing implemented JETVision on multiple inserting systems in order to increase its productivity and profitability, and ensure 100% matching of the company’s mailpieces. JETVision was selected over competitive solutions due to its ease of use for operators, a long-standing relationship with Bell and Howell and previous successes with JETVision at other companies by senior members of Aspen Marketing.

Impact of new solutions

The JETVision systems are integrated with MailStar inserters that enable Aspen Marketing to handle jobs of all sizes that require matching services. Aspen Marketing can now handle this specialized manufacturing in-house for a fraction of the cost and at a vastly reduced time frame. As a result, they have achieved a 20% cost savings on match mail. Jobs are turned around in days instead of weeks.

This new capability has convinced Aspen Marketing that, ideally, the JETVision technology should be added to the company’s entire inserter fleet. Since Aspen Marketing has offered automated, intelligent matching services to its customers, it has opened up new revenue channels from vertical markets that were previously hard to reach. With JETVision, they have won new business from a leading pharmaceutical company, and now intend to further their reach into new markets.

"JETVision is a quick and easy return on investment for any company that is looking to automate a manual mailing process," said Denny Dee.