Classifying – separating – and assorting solids – Sorting special items – and certain methods and apparatus for... – Condition responsive means controls separating means
Reexamination Certificate
2000-09-15
2002-04-16
Walsh, Donald P. (Department: 3653)
Classifying, separating, and assorting solids
Sorting special items, and certain methods and apparatus for...
Condition responsive means controls separating means
C209S900000, C707S793000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06373012
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates to systems for sorting mail items and to related techniques for generating ordered lists and searching on such lists. More particularly, the invention relates to method and apparatus which facilitates selective outsorting or other selective custom remapping or sorting of mail items contained in a mass mailing, including improved search techniques usable therewith.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Many organizations perform mass mailings of post cards, letters, catalogs, magazines, packages or other mail items on a daily basis. Such mailings can frequently exceed a million items per day. However, for many such mailings, there are a significant percentage of items which need not be sent, and in some instances should not be sent. For example, many such mailings include notices that a subscription, insurance policy or the like is about to be cancelled or has been cancelled for nonpayment of a renewal fee, premium or the like or other dunning letter for nonpayment of amounts due. Since there is normally a delay of several days, for example three to five days, between the time action is taken to initiate the sending of such a letter and the time the letter is actually mailed, in a significant percentage of cases, perhaps 3-10 percent of the cases depending on the industry, payment has been received before the letter actually goes out. Since there is a cost of approximately 25 cents in postage alone for the sending of such a letter, and the receipt of such a letter can engender bad will on the part of the recipient and cost the sender additional money in customer relations personnel having to deal with a concerned or irate customer, it is desirable to purge such notices from a mailing. However, a system for quickly and easily performing such a purge does not currently exist.
Similarly, a potential problem for a charity, catalog company or other company doing a mass mailing for solicitation, advertising or related purposes to recipients whose names have been obtained from a variety of mailing lists, is that multiple items are frequently sent to the same recipient. The mailer may be unaware of the problem since a recipient may appear as John Doe on one list, J. Doe on a second list, Mr. and Mrs. John Doe on a third list, John and Jane Doe on a fourth list, etc. Such multiple mailings to a single recipient are undesirable both because of the cost, both postage costs and the cost of the catalog or other material being sent, and because receiving multiple copies of the same mailing is annoying to the recipient and reflects badly on the organization and competence of the sender. Therefore, it would be desirable if such multiple copies could be purged so that a given recipient receives only one, or at most two, copies of the mailing. However, a technique for easily and inexpensively accomplishing this objective does not currently exist.
Other situations also exist where some type of custom purge, custom sorting and/or remapping is desirable on a given mailing. For example, where an international mailing is to be sorted by a system which handles only numeric characters, alpha-numeric postal codes for some countries may need to be remapped to for example a numeric code for the country before application to the sorting equipment. There are also applications where a variety of programmable data manipulations, configurable outsorting of mail items, or various types of selective sorting of mail may be required or otherwise desirable or where it is desirable to perform statistical modeling, trend analysis, frequency distribution or other analysis on mail items being sent. While some of the these functions can be performed at a main computer of the mailing organization before mail items are addressed and sorted for mailing, this does not provide information on mail items actually sent, and may therefore be less accurate than collecting information as the mail items are being sorted for delivery to the post office. Such a procedure also permits errors which have not been caught and corrected earlier in the system to still be corrected before the mailing goes out, for example to pick up a recently received change of address. Further, it would be desirable if such objectives could be accomplished without requiring any changes to existing sorting systems and without requiring reprogramming of the computers used to currently control such sort operations. None of the above capabilities currently exist.
While the various operations indicated above could be performed by receiving an entire postal code for each mail item, and then performing matches or other operations on each such received code in order to effect the desired purge/re-mapping function, current sorting systems for mail items operate at very high speed, for example approximately twelve mail items per second for an illustrative system, in order to permit optimum utilization of available sort equipment. It is important that any method and apparatus for accomplishing the various functions discussed above not have a significant adverse impact on system throughput. Since postal code characters are received in a typical sorting system one character at a time, a procedure which permits characters to be matched on as received, rather than waiting for the entire postal code to be read and received, could permit desired operations to be performed, and in many cases completed, while the characters are being received, thereby resulting in substantially no delay as a result of these operations, and could significantly reduce any delays resulting from operations which can only be completed after all characters are received, thereby permitting the various operations indicated above to be performed with negligible impact on system throughput. Similar problems can arise in other applications, for example some artificial intelligence applications, where data is received piecemeal, generally a character at a time, and particularly where decisions may need to be made before all data is received. However, existing techniques for storing ordered lists or for searching on such lists do not normally permit such searching to be performed, character by, character as, characters are being received. A need therefore exists for an improved ordered list storage and searching technique for facilitating such character-by-character searching.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
In accordance with the above, this invention provides a method and apparatus for use in a system utilizing a sort processor to sort mail items based on an N character postal code read from each mail item by a code reader, the apparatus operating to facilitate the custom sorting, outsorting or other re-mapping of mail items from a mailing. The apparatus includes a memory storing a listing of postal codes for which mail items are, for example to be custom sorted or outsorted; and a processor to which outputs from the code reader are applied, the processor searching for matches between codes applied thereto and codes stored in the listing, passing selected outputs to the sort processor in response to matches found for selected mail items, and passing different selected outputs to the sort processor for mail items on which no match is found. Where no match is found, the postal code may for example be passed unaltered to the sort processor, while if a match is found, a defined value may be passed to the sort processor. The sort processor may respond to the defined value by outsorting the corresponding mail item. Alternatively, if no match is found, a defined value may be passed to the sort processor. The defined value may be a defined count value or a defined forced output value. A forced output value for each stored postal code may for example be stored in the list with the corresponding code. The sort processor may respond to a defined value by outsorting the corresponding mail item.
For other embodiments, if a match is found, a selected action is taken as a function of at least one stored condition. For example, the number of matches in a sort for a given stored postal cod
Crutchfield Christopher L.
Wheeler William
Beauchaine Mark J.
Lockheed Martin Corporation
Walsh Donald P.
Wolf Greenfield & Sacks P.C.
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