The Belgian Post Office chooses the Esker FlyDoc technology for its on demand Click & Post Mail Service
The Belgian post office, La Poste – De Post, leader in postal services and in the document processing chain in Belgium, has chosen to OEM the technology and infrastructure of Fly Doc by Esker, the world leader in business document automation, in order to develop its “Click & Post” mail sending service. The partnership is based on the “Software as a Service” model (SaaS), which is part of the Esker international expansion strategy for the mail on demand market: a market estimated at over 800 million mail items per year in France alone.
In order to facilitate and simplify the life of Belgian users, the Belgian post office will launch its new “Click & Post” service this year to enable Belgian companies to send their mail, on demand, directly from their computer or their company applications (i.e. marketing mailings, invoices, registered mail, invitations). Instead of wasting time handling paper and envelopes, the users will be able to send mail as easily as an e-mail without leaving their desk.
To develop this service, the Belgian post office has chosen to rely, as a white brand service, on the technology, the experience and the infrastructure of the FlyDoc electronic post office by Esker. After defining the specifications with the Belgian post office, Esker set up a development team and project managers to customize the FlyDoc application for “Click & Post” and build mail on demand production facilities for the Belgian post office.
Esker is proposing a pay-as-you-go service to the Belgian post office as a full application that includes a virtual printer and a web interface in the “Click & Post” design for Belgian companies, an Internet hosting infrastructure, including fifty servers to receive and process the requests from the customers of the Belgian post office 24/7, and On demand post production facilities set up at eXbo, a subsidiary of the Belgian post office.
These facilities can create mail in real time in color and black and white on the same day and submit them to the “Click & Post” service. “After studying several solutions on the market, we were won over by the Esker solution. It offers a user interface that is extremely simple and based on a powerful infrastructure, which is flexible and complete and has already been tried and tested in France, the United States and Australia,” explains Renaud Chaudoir, Product Manager of “Click & Post”.
This partnership with the Belgian post office is part of the Esker international expansion strategy for the mail on demand market. After setting up mail facilities in France, the United States and Australia, Esker would like to develop partnerships with postal organizations or large printing and envelope stuffing companies in order to cover quickly and broadly all the industrialized countries where Esker has a presence. These partners will be able to produce mail on demand in their own country, while marketing the FlyDoc service as their own brand to exploit their own renown in their country.
To attain this objective, Esker set up a team at the beginning of 2007 for the FlyDoc OEM service which will give the key players on the postal market special access to FlyDoc platforms, a customized user interface and the service and advice required to set up on demand postal facilities.
“The fact that the Belgian post office has chosen Esker to develop its “Click & Post” service constitutes for Esker its first large success as part of the rapid international expansion of the FlyDoc service. This partnership has given support to the soundness of this strategy. We are in the process of doing everything to ensure that this is just the first in a long line,” added Jean-Michel Bérard, President of the Board of Directors of Esker.
About La Poste – De Post
De Post-La Poste is one of Belgium’s largest companies. Its main activities are grouped in two business units: Mail and Retail. The Mail business unit handles 3.7 billion mail items per year. Every day, 15,000 mail carrier
