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Hybrid printing centers: how we materialize millions of letters every day

Have you ever wondered how letters with fines from the traffic police or invoices from Rostelecom are printed? To send a letter, you need to print it, buy an envelope and stamps and spend time going to the post office. And if there are one hundred thousand such letters? And a million?

There is a hybrid mail for mass production of consignments - here they print, pack and send correspondence, which cannot be delivered electronically. It is enough for the client to transfer information about the recipient and download the text in digital form, we will do the rest.

Now hybrid and public services are used by public and private companies that send thousands of items daily. Among them are the traffic police, Rostelecom, Sberbank.

Most of the work in the workshops is automated - letters are printed using industrial printers with huge bobbins and automatically packed on special lines.

The cost of the service at the same time remained the same as that of self-dispatch. For regular letters without tracking, this is 27 rubles 60 kopecks, for registered letters - 64 rubles 80 kopecks.

Printing production is available in all regions of Russia, so many letters do not go through the stage of regional transportation and are delivered faster.

How hybrid printing works


The work of hybrid mail is provided by 55 printing shops, of which four are large-scale production in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan and Novosibirsk. In these industries we can print up to 4 million letters a day.
The client - a private individual or organization - sends us a letter in electronic form. Legal entities upload the archive with pdf-files to the personal account otpravka.pochta.ru or transfer data via API through integration with the EPS system (electronic mail system).



Individuals upload letters through their personal account zakaznoe.pochta.ru .


The sent files go to the EPS information system, are processed and transferred further to the automated system of hybrid mail management.

The letters we receive in PDF are laid out in json, a simple and understandable format for processing, we will automatically convert them to text and prepare them for printing and wrapping in envelopes: we set the boundaries, check the fonts and the sealing area. We verify the address and index of the recipient so that the letter goes where necessary.

Each shipment has a specific data set, like a transaction in a bank:
  • recipient and sender information
  • departure rate
  • weight
  • print options for each sheet: single-sided, double-sided, paper type, density
  • envelope information: size, number of windows

Using this data, we calculate how to rationally use the space on the sheet. To save space, you can use a different layout of the text or vary the types of envelopes - with one, two windows or without them, prepare envelopes with a printed address.

The machine can print a letter on one or two sides of the paper, put it in an envelope in different ways - Z, P, house. Print the address block on one side of the sheet, and the information itself on the other. Now the data on the layout on the machine is set by a person, but we plan to improve this part of the work as well - the data will be transferred to the equipment through an automated control system for hybrid printing.

The file for printing, which is sent to the printer after preparation, is a large pdf or afp, in which up to 500 letters are “glued”.

Small workshops use sheet-fed printers, which can print up to two thousand items per day.


Sheet printer


Printing in large workshops is automated and takes place in three stages


The first machine takes a file and prints a lot of letters in a roll.



A person removes the reel from a role printer and puts it on the cutter, where the tape is divided into A4 sheets.


At the next stage, the converting machine folds the sheets in a certain way for packaging and puts them in envelopes. This device can read a special barcode (dataMatrix), by which it understands in which envelope you need to put a certain sheet. The machine can pack no more than 5 A4 printed sheets in an envelope - hence the restriction on the size of the registered electronic letter.


Ready-made letters are collected by workers in boxes, loaded onto carts and sent to the post office.

How to use hybrid mail for your tasks


If you need to send a lot of letters, then you can transfer to the Mail the functions of preparing, printing, packing and sending them. For the sender, each sheet costs money, and these costs are easy to optimize.

The cost of the service consists of two parts - printing and shipping fees. The price of printing depends on the volume of the order, the number of colors, the packaging method and other parameters. And the shipping costs do not differ from ordinary tariffs. For each order, an SLA is agreed - the time period when letters should be sent to the post office. Notifications on the screen and letters about the approaching deadline help us to track the time.

Distributed printing


We strive to further reduce delivery time and traffic load. To do this, we are working on the creation of distributed printing technology, which will automatically send print jobs so that letters appear on paper as close as possible to the recipient.

For example, a person violated the rules of the road in Moscow, and is registered in Khabarovsk. He will receive a fine from the Moscow branch of the traffic police. Our task is to deliver a letter to Khabarovsk with minimal movement. Instead of printing it in Moscow and sending it to another city by plane or train, we materialize the shipment at the center closest to the addressee and deliver it with minimal logistics costs.

, zakaznoe.pochta.ru.

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