What is BS EN 13619 - Optical characteristics for processing letters about?
BS EN 13619 is a European Standard that specifies optical characteristics for processing letters and gives guidelines on the values of these attributes that will assure a high level of address readability. BS EN 13619 is aimed at facilitating relations between postal operators and customers by providing information that mailers can use to ensure that the addresses they print can be processed successfully by postal automation systems.
BS EN 13619 is intended to support:
- Assessment of the probable readability of a printed address, using given address recognition equipment, without actually submitting it to the equipment
- Determination of the changes in address printing characteristics that are required to achieve the desired level of address readability using given address recognition equipment
- Assessment of the complexity, and thus the cost, of the address recognition equipment needed to achieve the desired level of readability of addresses with given printing characteristics
BS EN 13619 applies to mail items whose size is up to and including C51, but may also be applied to oversize items, commonly referred to as C5+, and to flats. The address blocks covered are:
- The delivery address block
- The sender address block if this is printed on the same side of the mail item as the delivery address block
Who is BS EN 13619 - Optical characteristics for processing letters for?
BS EN 13619 on optical characteristics for processing letters is useful for:
- The postal services
- Postal operators
- The automation industry
- Video coders
- Data analysts
- Quality control personnel
Why should you use BS EN 13619 - Optical characteristics for processing letters?
Organizations that use automated inbound mail processing reap tremendous benefits. The system ensures that incoming mail is delivered to the correct location faster, saving document processing time and increasing business process efficiency while boosting customer service quality. The rapidity of mail processing and delivery is the most important feature of quality of service which is requested by any customer of a postal operator. Such automation depends on the speed and accuracy of interpretation of mail item addresses by optical character recognition (OCR) equipment and/ or human operators (video-coders) working from video images of the mail items.
BS EN 13619 provides its mailers with assistance to maximize the OCR readability of their mail items by providing guidelines for printing postal addresses. Some of the guidelines also support video encoding from grey-level pictures. Using BS EN 13619 guidelines users are responsible for determining the physical parameters which are required to achieve compliance after taking account of characteristics that result from mail item features, other than printing, such as covering, the use of transparent window envelopes, and the use of address labels.
