Appendix B Quality Assurance (QA) Process
Address Management A Whistl Account Manager will guide the Customer through the Address Management process. Address Management accreditation can be achieved in one of two ways. • If the Customer uses a Royal Mail recognised address management software supplier to process address lists on a regular basis. • A ‘1 in n’ sample*’ of 5,000 addresses is supplied to Royal Mail on disk together with ‘Quality Assurance ‘Form A’. The sample must be supplied in a certain format, details of which are provided to you with ‘Form A’. - *This involves dividing the number of records in the address database by 5,000 (the sample size required) e.g. a database of 100,000 would be divided by 5,000 (sample size) resulting in a sampling frequency of 20 (100,000 / 5,000 =20). Therefore record numbers 1, 21, 41, 61 and so on would be extracted for the sample. • The Customer’s mailing list contains a minimum of 90% full and accurate addresses and Postcodes. • Where a full and accurate Postcode exists, all are allocated a Delivery Point Suffix (DPS). A minimum of 80% are allocated an accurate DPS, the rest are allocated an Access 120DPS. See Appendix H for further information. Although this forms part of the mandatory QA accreditation process, the customer can also use it to conduct an address ‘health check’, or interim assessment. It can be accessed at two levels: • Postcode validation – designed to check your (or your service provider’s) ability to validate, check and maintain Postcode levels. DPS allocation – designed to check your (or your service provider’s) ability to apply a correct and valid DPS to an address list which has already been checked for Postcode accuracy. These checks are designed to ensure that:
To gain maximum benefit from the machineable downstream access services, the Customer needs to ensure the quality of your mail piece; printed barcode, address management and mail presentation systems are all maintained to a consistently high level. To help achieve this, a Quality Assurance (QA) process has been developed to check all these elements against a benchmark standard. What Downstream Access services require a Quality Assurance check? It is important to remember that although the QA process gives an ‘up front’ accreditation the Customer must continue to maintain these standards on an ongoing basis. There are two ways for the Customer to be assessed under the QA process; an interim assessment and a full accreditation. Interim Assessment This allows access to elements of the QA process before applying for full accreditation. An interim assessment does not count towards full accreditation and is intended as a guide only. Full Accreditation • Access 70 CBC. • Access 70 OCR.
Full accreditation entails comprehensive checks on:
• Mail piece design. • Barcode printing. • Address management.
The following section provides a brief outline of these testing criteria.
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