Using the DAT-MAIL/Tagger Interface - Use Tagger to Generate Siblings Tags

What is a Sibling Tray, Sack or Pallet?

When the piece attributes used to define a presort are not exactly right, the mailer’s presort program may indicate that more pieces of mail will fit into a tray than is actually the case. Since many presorts are run in advance of the production of the mail piece, these piece attributes are estimated and may not be correct. Rather than re-run the pre-sort to correct this problem, it is sometimes easier to put the pieces that won’t fit into an “overflow tray”. This is permitted by the DMM but Full Service mailers need to label the tray with a unique Intelligent Mail Tray barcode (IMTb) and add it to their Mail.dats.

The DTAC, the organization that maintains the Mail.dat specification, calls the trays that are added to correct a tray count “siblings”. Even if a mailer is not mailing under Full Service, adding sibling trays allows mailers to correct the tray counts on PostalOne! postage statements and reports which will otherwise be incorrect because of the extra overflow tray.

The same condition can happen when printing pallet placards and pallet labels. If your Tagger is equipped to print pallet labels or placards as well as tray tags, you can also use this solution to create sibling pallet labels.

When a sibling tray, sack or pallet is added to Mail.dat, the USPS does not have to know which pieces went onto the sibling tray, sack or pallet. What sibling records tell the USPS is that the contents of the original sack, tray or pallet are now split up into multiple containers. The sum of the pieces of all siblings along with the actual contents of the physical tray, sack or pallet will be equal to the pieces that were in the original tray, sack or pallet.

For example, if a tray was supposed to hold 200 pieces but only 180 actually fit, an over flow tray with 20 pieces was created. The total of the two actual trays is still 200 pieces which was originally what was supposed to fit in the original tray. The contents are now split up across multiple trays, in this case two trays.

Continue Using the DAT-MAIL/Tagger Interface - The Difference between Splitting and Siblings