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Healthcare Solutions Provider Turns to Pitney Bowes and the Industrial Internet for Preventive Care of Machines

PBI | June 3, 2016

Pitney Bowes (NYSE:PBI), a global technology company that provides innovative products and solutions to power commerce, will showcase its recently-announced Clarity Solutions Suite this week at drupa2016 in Dusseldorf, Germany. Hosted on GE’s Predix platform, Clarity represents the first commercially available solution generated by the collaboration between Pitney Bowes’ and GE to bring the power of the Industrial Internet to the production mail industry.

The Pitney Bowes Clarity Solutions Suite was recently beta tested by HM Health Solutions (HMHS), a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based subsidiary of Highmark Health that provides enterprise services, infrastructure management, data center hosting and print management capabilities. HMHS has been a Pitney Bowes customer since its formation in 2014 and uses Pitney Bowes software, production mail inserting solutions and presort services to process and mail more than 125 million packages including health care statements, explanations of benefits and other critical communications each year.

Producing such a large volume of personalized mail containing highly sensitive and confidential healthcare information doesn’t leave room for error. So, when it came to investing in the long-term health of their own mailing operation, HMHS turned to Pitney Bowes again, this time for a dose of the best medicine – prevention.

HMHS was one of the first to implement the Clarity Solutions Suite, a SaaS-based offering leveraging the physical and digital technologies of the Industrial Internet, to integrate and organize data collected from sensors on production mail machines to support real-time insight, predictive analytics and prescriptive maintenance.

“HM Health Solutions has a world class operation and a growth strategy that requires them to maximize machine uptime. They were already highly regarded for operational efficiency. This made them the perfect partner to test the Clarity Solutions Suite,” said Jason Dies, President, Document Messaging Technologies, Pitney Bowes. “If Clarity could help HMHS avoid machine downtime and be more productive, then we knew it could help many of our clients.”

HMHS specifically leveraged Clarity Advisor offering, which provides an intelligent assessment of equipment performance to help drive machine efficiency. The solution proactively monitors trends and patterns to diagnose and resolve many issues before they occur, resulting in increased runtime capacity and reduced risk of downtime.

“The Pitney Bowes Clarity Solutions Suite will improve our productivity by running diagnostic tests and preventing production issues before they occur,” said Paul Jorgensen, director of output services, HM Health Solutions, “Clarity has been instrumental in enabling us to provide the highest quality of service to our customers.

For example, HM Health Solution’s systems were running well with no noticeable issues. However, by monitoring data extracted from the system, Pitney Bowes detected something wasn’t quite right. “With Clarity, we were able to identify a leak in a vacuum pump that our operator didn’t notice. This allowed us to fix the issue on our schedule, before it caused a complete system failure,” said Jorgensen. “We are able to push efficiency data from our systems to Pitney Bowes, who has a much better perspective of what the numbers are telling us. If they see deviation in our performance from industry benchmarks, then they’re able to take an even deeper look and help us fix issues before they become a crisis.”

Eventually, through industry benchmarks provided by Pitney Bowes through Clarity, it is anticipated that HMHS will be able to understand how it compares against leading mail operations around the globe, allowing it to make adjustments to improve quality, efficiency and productivity.

“At the end of the day, you can’t deny the benefits of early detection and preventive care.” said Jorgensen. “The Clarity Solutions Suite is helping our production mail machines live a happier, healthier, longer and more profitable life.”

The Clarity Solutions Suite leverages the newly-launched Pitney Bowes Commerce Cloud, a commerce enabler that provides access to solutions, analytics and APIs across the full commerce continuum with speed and agility to help clients identify customers, locate opportunities, enable communications, power shipping from anywhere to everywhere, and manage payments.

About Pitney Bowes

Pitney Bowes (NYSE:PBI) is a global technology company offering innovative products and solutions that enable commerce in the areas of customer information management, location intelligence, customer engagement, shipping and mailing, and global ecommerce. More than 1.5 million clients in approximately 100 countries around the world rely on products, solutions and services from Pitney Bowes. For additional information, visit Pitney Bowes at www.pitneybowes.com.