RE: Suggestions wanted on reducing time to assemble month-end invoices

When we've had to deal with this kind of problem, we just made each document into a separate spooled file and create them in the proper order. That may involve a significant amount of work, depending how your job runs.



-----Original Message-----
From: Vernon Hamberg [mailto:vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, November 02, 2017 4:07 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Suggestions wanted on reducing time to assemble month-end invoices

Y'all

We are at 7.1 and cannot upgrade to 7.3 at the moment, as we want to do.


We have a month-end process (Robot job) that prints invoice reprints for customers who want snail mail.

In that same process we print an itemized statement of those invoices - separate programs.

Both outputs are in order of the billing address - we send everything together that goes to a single billing address, while each invoice may be for different service addresses.


Currently it takes 8 person-days to riffle through the stacks of invoices and the stacks of statements and match them up, then stuff them into envelopes or whatever.

Our central print services has been talking with us about a machine that can print or sort, burst according to, say, a 2D barcode, and stuff each set into some kind of envelope.

Problem is, it can stuff only up to maybe 8 sheets. Our bundles often have over 100 sheets to the same billing address.


I was told that there might not always be a 1-to-1 relationship between
statement and invoice.

Invoice reprints can either be AFPDS or USERASCII (we are using the
AFPRSC keyword at 7.1 and converting for inclusion of PNG signatures).


It seems we need some other way to handle this, to reduce the
person-time involved. And help with accuracy (that hasn't been brought
up, I just mention it, since people currently go through the stacks and
scan by eye for a change in billing address).


So I/we have been talking about finding a way to combine the output of
the 2 programs in a way that would improve the time to do this by hand.
1. Put in a colored separator sheet or other marker to help people
identify a set of invoices
2. Combine the output from the 2 programs in the correct order
(statement first, then related invoices)


I've done a little research on a setting on the DEVD for separator
drawer and separator program, as well as other separator settings on
PRTF and OUTQ. And am aware of separator settings on printers, though
not very much up on that.

We are open to commercial solutions within some kind of reason.

Regards
Vern