National Postal Forum 2022

BlueCrest Spotlights

Above: Postmaster General DeJoy with Dennis LeStrange and Carl Amacker | Below: BlueCrest making waves at NPF.

National Postal Forum

Facing the Future Together

by David Bush

The industry had high expectations for the 2022 National Postal Forum. In 2019 and 2020, NPF had to cancel in-person attendance due to the pandemic, instead relying on a virtual platform. This year, a noticeable excitement permeated the air as attendees descended on Phoenix, Arizona for the first gathering in years. With the theme of this year’s NPF being “Facing the Future Together,” customers, vendors, and postal industry personnel were prepared to maximize their time together. Reflecting this theme, BlueCrest positioned all three of its company booths next to each other—with the BCC Software and WindowBook booths standing adjacent to BlueCrest’s, which now presented the recently acquired Fluence Automation products as part of the BlueCrest brand. The proximity of the three booths led to a great time of collaboration between teams and customers. Attendees enjoyed a keynote address to kick-off the postal forum from USPS Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. During his presentation, DeJoy highlighted the continued focus to transform the postal service under his leadership. He stressed that the USPS is in a better financial condition than it was a year ago, but that changes would continue to be made including the need to “reinvent the delivery network.” After the keynote address, the show floor opened for traffic. The BlueCrest booth stayed buzzing for the entire show, thanks in part to all the excitement generated by the mixed mail stacker. Many customers and prospects were eager to see how BlueCrest handles mixed mail on its new range of sorting equipment. Also, in the booth drawing a lot of attention was the OneSort Workstation Solution with Sort Engine 360, as well as a digital kiosk showcasing BlueCrest’s software solutions. New this year to the Postal Forum was the inclusion of an additional day, Thursday, for people specifically in the Vote-by-Mail segment of our industry. Multiple BlueCrest team members attended and got involved with the one-day Election Mail Workshop. The BlueCrest team really appreciated the opportunity to reconnect with many clients in-person for the first time in a few years. Overall, National Postal Forum 2022 was a smashing success—and, echoing the theme of the show, we truly excited to face the future—together.

Team Highlight: Engineering

More Chips, Less Dip!

by Steve Varga

Engineers love food – but more on that later.

John Shriver (Team Lead) Ben Pardee Gary Comstock Jim Hulburt

During the age of supply chain challenges, in particular a shortage of complex electronic parts commonly referred to as “chips”, it has driven our teams to get creative in keeping the factory supplied with circuit boards that use these chips. So, what is a Chip? In this case it is the brain of the circuit board, technically known as the Micro Controller Unit (MCU) or Microprocessor. These are made from silicon (derived for common sand) using long and very complex processes. Ultimately, these MCU’s when coupled with embedded software (or Firmware) is what gives each circuit board its intelligence. Because COVID created supply gaps in the manufacturing of these chips, along with many other things we buy as part of the global supply chain, the electrical engineering team had to rapidly perform a complex redesign of the circuit board used in sortation stacker modules. This redesign will allow different ‘package types’ of the chip we use to be placed on one common circuit board layout. Simply put, this redesign makes the circuit board adaptable to utilize different chips that are more available in the supply chain. Think of it as allowing a square peg to fit in a round hole. The project is named Apollo 13 after the famous engineering effort to save the astronauts of that mission from death in space by quickly creating an air-scrubber system using only parts available on the rocket. Without this they would not have had enough clean air to breath on their way back to Earth. Your Apollo 13 team of engineers is managed by Jason Harbert, Director of Electrical Engineering and is made up of Josh Schriver (lead), Ben Pardee, Gary Comstock, and Jim Hulbert.

The mission-critical goal was to have the redesign complete and fully tested in early May which was a monumental task under any circumstance. SUCCESS! The team met the challenge giving BlueCrest another option to keep production of our systems moving forward if shortages of this part continue to be problematic. A textbook example of BlueCrest’s ICARE values! Now more about the love of food and the connection to those electrical engineers – so, we know we have these things called ‘chips’ but there are other electrical components that have food references… components called toroids are typically referred to as ‘donuts’, while ‘DIP’ is actually an acronym for an older chip type known as a Dual Inline Package. Finally, all the small inexpensive parts found on a circuit board are often called the ‘popcorn’ parts. Moral of the story – keep electrical engineers fed well and they can work miracles!

Caption: A view of the circuit board and “chip” pad redesign.