When renewal forms were sent out in the mail to the members of the Australian Football League, they naturally contained personal information including the name, address, phone number and birth date of the recipient. Unfortunately, an error resulted in printing the same data for a different member appearing on the reverse.

Although nobody at the AFL offices caught the error, a total of 120 people have called in to report the problem. This figure should discourage the league management, because it is probably a tiny percentage of the number of people actually impacted by the issue. The Age reported the following from AFL media manager Patrick Keane:

“We are extremely concerned about it and we apologise unreservedly and we are following it up as to how this has occurred. At this point, we think it is restricted to a couple of batches. I couldn’t give you the exact number of how many have been mailed at this point.”

The creation of mailings is a common business function, and the AFL likely sends out batches of letters on a regular basis. Although a mistake was made in this instance, the volume and impact of the problem indicates that the workflow process mailing has serious flaws. Companies should use formal methods such as business process modeling to prevent these issues and provide maximum value for all stakeholders.

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