Posted on Mon, Jul 11, 2011 @ 01:19 PM
Automation: Cutting the Cost of Failures
By Bruno Henry, Chief Operating Officer, Sefas Innovation
Nobody likes talking about mistakes, especially when they are seen to cost money. But there is really no getting away from it. Printing is an industry where metal, fluids and paper interact at high speed under less than ideal conditions, where tiny software bugs or sensor defects or minute differences of alignment or registration can throw everything out. The data we work with is not always as clean or complete as it should be. The materials we use cannot always be totally pure and flawless. And sometimes we just mess things up.
Compared with most other industries, the level of built-in checks and routine disciplines in printing is extraordinarily high. We rip and proof and check and proof again. We take a good look at everything before we hit the button, we watch it through the machines and we check once more to make sure the final piece looks right. But errors still occur. Reprints happen. And dealing with them represents an appreciable part of the production center budget.
One of the great, unacknowledged strengths of automation is its ability to attack and bring down the costs of failure, at almost every stage of the print and mailing process.
It all starts with the content – the text, the design, the branding and the variable data. Ultimately, that must be the responsibility of the business users and document stakeholders – people who are probably a very long way from the print shop floor. What they release to the production center should, ideally, be perfect. It won’t be, but it is part of our job to give them every opportunity to catch their own mistakes.
This was something Sefas specifically took into account when developing the Producer module for Open Print. If business users are to carry out proper pre-print quality checking, they must be given helpful and appropriate ways to do it. The documents must be readily available to the right people, but secured so that they are inaccessible to the wrong people. Those with the authority to take a snap decision and pull or alter a document at the last moment must be given the power to do their job, under a clearly defined hierarchy of privileges, and all views and changes must be recorded in a full and permanent audit trail. These days stakeholders are probably as likely to be traveling as they are to be sitting at a desk, so it also makes sense to ensure that document previews are available online.
All this is actually easy enough to automate and manage, as part of a wider, integrated automated system. Yet there are still many production centers that rely entirely on manual procedures for pre-print quality checking. It may be hard to calculate exactly how much the odd mistakes that creep through cost these people over the course of a year. The only certainty is that it will be far more than the small investment that would be needed to put an end to this kind of antiquated procedure. How many people in a bank or an insurance company are stopped in their tracks and diverted from their work whenever there is the slightest brush with the regulatory authorities? How many jobs and projects get held up?
Compliance imposes certain added costs when it works. But they are nothing beside the costs incurred when compliance goes wrong. When something slips through, compliance issues can frequently mean boardroom involvement, witch-hunts and blame games, possible fines and compensation payments, and even the imposition of costly and over-defensive measures to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Sefas has certainly benefited at times from senior management suddenly dictating that automation must be introduced immediately, at almost any price, after some embarrassing mistake has provoked the wrath of the regulator.
Lapses in pre-print checking are obviously not the only causes of unfortunate and expensive errors. Every time reprints are necessary, new opportunities for error are created. One problem is solved and, all too often, a new one is introduced, especially when manual intervention is required. There are inevitable interruptions and delays as operators switch over to handle the reprints, with knock-on effects throughout the production center. For a long time, it was a particular ambition of mine to find ways to automate reprints, with the objectives of improving productivity and protecting the integrity of documents and data. Now that the Sefas software offers automated reprints as a matter of course, I find it hard to imagine any company choosing to operate without this facility.
This may be just one corner of the automation story, but it is highly significant. The vast majority of batches – over 90 percent – contain some documents that need reprinting, for whatever reason. If almost every job carries the cost burden of reprints and remedial work, these extra costs have to be built into prices. If customers will not put up with that, there is only one other place they can come from, and that is the print provider’s margin.
Open Print’s achievements in this area address these cost penalties by transforming the processing of reprints. Every document that passes through the production process is automatically checked. The closed loop feedback system that tracks their progress catches the ones that are not up to standard and automatically submits them for reprint, flagging up the problems, fixing them and then finally updating job and SLA statistics when the stragglers have been brought into line. Reprints that need particular colors or treatments can be grouped and handled together, while the reprints needed to close out an urgent mailing run can be directed to a local printer so that they can be collected the moment they are ready.
Protecting document integrity, cutting down on errors, and streamlining reprinting is not the most glamorous side of production automation. Unless you take a sample period – a week, or, better still, a month – and carefully track how many mistakes occur and how much time and effort it takes to put them right, you will never have an accurate figure for the actual cost of failure. But senior managers who have completed this exercise are usually left ashen-faced at the amount of money they are routinely pouring down the drain. The ability to slash these losses and provide all the other, highly positive advantages of an automated production workflow makes a very potent argument for a modest investment in print and mailing center automation.
I invite you to subscribe to my blog, Taming The Document Supply Chain, for an ongoing discussion about print, progress and profits >>>
Posted on Thu, Jun 30, 2011 @ 11:23 AM
Harnessing Resources
What does a company really need, if it is to exploit the potential of outsourcing to specialist suppliers and still retain control of the key aspects of its business? It needs a particular sort of outsource management software that we have not yet seen packaged in this way as a commercial product.
For the traditional Sefas customer – the financial services institution, insurer, utility, telecoms company or government agency – the requirements are clear. The software suite must be comprehensive, flexible, integrated. It must be capable of pulling together resources that were not necessarily built to work in harmony, so that progress does not depend entirely on the organization’s ability to invest in new hardware or bespoke software solutions at every turn of the road.
Working With Other Systems
It must be able to handle inputs it was never designed for, such as those generated by legacy applications, and generate output in forms that seem to multiply with every year that goes by.
It must be able to hand off jobs smoothly to other systems or suppliers, and to accept inbound tasks or data in a wide range of formats. It must be capable of automating processes and monitoring them at every possible level. It should also be as near transparent and invisible as possible, so that its presence is indicated more by what it enables than by what meets the eye.
It should, in short, do what Open Print does, and go about it in the low key fuss-free way the Sefas product does.
So, if it swims like a duck and quacks like a duck…
Software For An Outsourced World
Maybe that’s it. Maybe that is what Open Print 7.0 has quietly evolved into – the ideal software for managing profitably in an outsourced world.
It has never occurred to me to call this “outsource management software”. That’s a phrase I associate with a few hamfisted, overpriced attempts, several years ago, to combine IT monitoring systems with contract management packages in order to pressure outsourced suppliers into sticking to their commitments and meeting their SLAs. As I recall it, each of those expensive packages seemed to work brilliantly for one set of circumstances and one organization – the one for which it was originally developed. As soon as you moved it across into a different business or technical environment, its usefulness declined abruptly, by about 80 percent.
Perhaps I should be avoiding the phrase “outsource management software” and trying to find another label we could use to describe what this product has become.
Maybe I should hold a competition among readers of this blog to come up with a better tag to describe what Open Print does. But when you’ve got a software suite that’s just right for managing outsourced operations, perhaps there really is no alternative.
Posted on Mon, Jun 27, 2011 @ 11:11 AM
Printers Welcome Outsourcing Opportunities
Everyone knows that an increasing number of large companies – banks, insurers, healthcare providers, utilities, and many others – are turning away from the idea of doing their own printing and mail handling in-house and embracing the idea of outsourcing.
That is a well-established and much-discussed trend. But what is not so generally recognized is how happy the printers are to step in and play their role in this outsourcing revolution.
For those print services providers that are prepared to make the necessary investments and position themselves to profit from the changing dynamics of the industry, this is a great opportunity. It makes sense, of course. In simple terms, all that’s happening is that we’re moving to a situation where more of our printing is done by printers, rather than home loans providers or cell phone specialists.
Service Providers Are Biggest Buyers Of Open Print
This shift has been going on for some years, and was accelerated by the shock of the recent recession. But the rate of change has increased rapidly in recent months.
What we have seen at Sefas is a surge in the volume of opportunities for outsourcers, to the point where well over two-thirds of our American sales of the Open Print software suite are now going to outsourcers.
On the face of it, this may seem slightly odd. People generally assume that it is the customer side of the outsourcing relationship that will see the biggest benefits from a move to an integrated, automated software environment. After all, normalized data makes it easier for the customer to set suppliers bidding against each other on a like for like basis, or even to switch suppliers at short notice.
Now Outsourcers Embrace Outsourcing
But there’s more to it than that. With the whole industry and its technologies in a state of rapid change, adaptability is at a premium. Post-composition techniques are keeping legacy applications alive, while digital color, variable data, transpromo marketing and multi-channel campaigns are changing the rules of the game. It is becoming ever harder to predict what line-up of hardware and software will be needed, even a few months ahead.
This is the background to a situation where the outsourcers are changing their approach and embracing a new tactic – outsourcing.
Just as the banks weren’t willing to carry on printing, the printing outsourcers recognize that tweaking, upgrading, and developing their own software is something that is too specialized, too slow, and too expensive to be dependent on in-house resources. They are now looking for professional, standardized software that they can buy in, but that will still give them all the options and operational and business flexibility they need.
Software Is Our Core Competence
So the banks have outsourced printing to the printers and the printers have outsourced software development to the software developers.
I have no problem with that, as you can imagine. Sefas is constantly updating Open Print in response to market changes, so we are naturally in a position to cover almost all the developments the printers’ in-house software teams might otherwise be tackling. And, of course, that is our core competence.
This whole outsourcing business is very logical. Printers for printing; Sefas for software. It makes you wonder why the trend took so long to gather pace.
Posted on Thu, Jun 23, 2011 @ 03:15 PM
Treat Your Outsourcer Like A Machine
Handing over data and documents in a normalized format is always going to be preferable, in strategic terms, because of the way it allows you to keep control of your customer information.
But there is another valuable advantage of this approach which is not nearly so obvious.
Because the exchange of data is in a standardized, normalized form, the outsourced supplier is effectively a “black box”, linked to your own system via a sophisticated machine interface. In fact, the outsourcer can be treated exactly like another piece of hardware, like a big printer or an inserter.
Real-Time Data On The Dashboard
Within your own automated system, you would expect to send control signals out to a printer and receive, in return, a continuous stream of real-time feedback from the equipment and its sensors about what it was doing and how it was performing. The dashboard on your management screen would monitor all the relevant aspects of the operation and give you the controls to make adjustments as required.
With the Sefas Open Print system, you have exactly this level of visibility and management control over what is going on at the remote printing site.
The performance and monitoring data that comes from the shop floor comes straight through to your dashboard, at the same time as it goes to the operator. You can see that a job has been received and scheduled, watch its progress through the system, react, if necessary, to any problems that are occurring, and know immediately when printing has finished and insertion and sorting have been completed.
A New Transparency That Is Good For Business
Never before has there been such an intimate relationship between customer and outsourcing supplier. Print and mailing services providers who make the effort to adapt to this new way of working soon discover that it builds trust and forms the basis for the development of solid and profitable long-term business relationships. On the other side of the coin, the customer benefits from a new ability to see and understand exactly what is being done. Outsourcers can be held to account for mistakes or failure to meet SLAs, and, in the worst case, normalized data streams make it easier to cut one’s losses and switch to a new supplier.
Both sides gain from the new transparency. Though it appears to be a technical issue, it brings real commercial benefits to the outsourcing relationship. Listening to the enthusiasm of those who have progressed to this new way of working, I find it hard to imagine they’ll ever think of turning the clock back.
Posted on Mon, Jun 20, 2011 @ 03:08 PM
End-to-End Integration Gives You Choices
Making a genuinely fast, smooth transition to outsourcing for your print and mailing operations obviously depends on several different factors. Crucially, of course, it means deciding exactly what you want to keep in house and what you want to ship out, and choosing the right outsourced service provider for the way you want to work.
But how you do what you do will also be dictated, to some extent, by the software system you adopt. This is not just a matter of choosing a system, like Sefas Open Print, that allows you to hand over work to the outsourcing supplier in a normalized format. It’s also to do with having integrated software that covers the full document supply chain from end to end. Sefas, of course, can offer that. But many other well-known names in this business can’t.
Organic Development Makes Better Software
They have their own strengths and weaknesses, but anyone who knows the industry knows that a genuine end-to-end offering is not something that HP Exstream or GMC can provide. Apart from Sefas, only Pitney Bowes can claim to cover the entire document supply chain, and that is a company where the approach is very different.
Where Sefas has developed its integrated end-to-end solution from the ground up, organically, Pitney Bowes has pieced together its offering through acquisitions, through purchasing a string of companies with specific expertise in various parts of the process. They have bought some good companies, with some good people and good ideas. But they face the fundamental problem of linking these disparate bits together and keeping them all in step as new capabilities and requirements are demanded by our hungry, ever-changing marketplace.
It’s almost a question of philosophy. They have to reconcile elements which derive from quite different approaches to individual parts of the document supply chain, and that is a problem in itself.
Integration Cuts Costs
But if it’s a philosophical issue, it’s one with direct financial consequences. Customers tell me our competitors have difficulty producing the major releases that would be needed to move their software forward as market conditions change. If that means the customer ends up with a large bill for professional and consultancy services to glue the component parts of the system together, it can be seen that the absence of true, dynamic integration actually has a cost attached to it that can be measured in dollars and cents. The kind of case by case solutions that emerge from that process may or may not be effective, but they are always expensive and they always cause delays.
Posted on Thu, Jun 16, 2011 @ 02:01 PM
Strategic Benefits
Besides making sure that you stay fully in control of what happens to your documents and your data, working with normalized data offers benefits at the strategic level, affecting the rate at which whole aspects of the company’s business can move forward.
In the case of a company switching from in-house printing and mailing to outsourced production, it can hugely simplify and speed up the transition.
I have known cases where the outsourcers have insisted that the entire document creation process needed to be worked through again. This imposed a huge cost penalty and effectively delayed the changeover for many months, wiping out most of the early gains from the move to outsourcing.
Speed Up The Transition By 12 Months Or More
Unless you’ve seen this nightmare process in action, you won’t believe how long and frustrating it can be. Companies that get themselves into this situation can easily spend 12 to 18 months grappling with it, when they could achieve the same results in maybe 3 to 6 months if they adopted the Sefas Open Print approach, using our fast post composition tools and normalizing the documents.
If using Open Print means that a big company or a financial institution can start to capture the benefits of outsourcing a full year earlier, that is obviously a significant business advantage.
Normalized Data Spells Flexibility
At the same time, once your documents are in the normalized virtual page format, you have the other great strategic advantage of flexibility.
If it turns out that your choice of outsourcer was wrong, you can cut your losses and switch to another supplier with little in the way of costs, complications or downtime. If you don’t want all your eggs in one basket, you can easily share the workload between two outsourcers, or send particular types of work to outsourcers with particular types of equipment or in particular locations.
Outsourcing Without The Upfront Investment
Fundamentally, using normalized data means that you do not have to make a large upfront investment of time and money in the transition process, or make a total commitment to a single supplier, before you can reap the rewards of the move to outsourcing. In an era of uncertainty and unpredictable change, those are pretty powerful arguments for choosing this route.
Posted on Mon, Jun 13, 2011 @ 01:00 PM
Staying In Control
How can you outsource a vital and complex print and mailing operation without putting yourself at the mercy of your chosen supplier?
The question left hanging in the air at the end of my last posting is a crucial one for insurers, banks, telephone companies and many other utilities that feel the need to focus more sharply on their core competencies. I used the phrase “keeping control of your gold”, and the gold in question is obviously your customer data. But how, in practice, can a company hold onto its data while still making it available on a daily basis for use by the printer?
Normalized Data Is The Key
The answer is that you have to find some way of dividing up the production process. You want to be able to work directly with the customer database and then hand over documents and data in some kind of standardized, normalized form for the supplier to carry out operations such as printing, folding, inserting, sorting, and mailing.
If you can do this, it changes the whole nature of the relationship between customers and outsourcing suppliers. Customers can invite competitive bids from prospective suppliers, change outsourcers rapidly if things are going wrong, and even take the decision to use two different companies, one for routine processing and another as fallback for disaster recovery purposes.
The Standard For Normalized Data
While there is not yet a universally recognized industry standard for normalized data that would allow any company to pass its work over to any outsourcer, Sefas has created a robust, practical format, known as VPF or virtual page format, that does this job very effectively. VPF sits right at the heart of the Open Print software suite. But I believe it could yet emerge as a proprietary de facto standard, across our whole industry, in the same way as Adobe’s PDF standard has won universal acceptance in its field.
VPF is tried and tested and it has proved itself over the last few years in tough real-world conditions. It means that the appearance of a document need only be defined once, for any machine or any medium. By converting data streams from many different applications into a common, normalized, page-independent format that can be manipulated and optimized in many different ways, VPF ensures that the company that outsources its printing and mailing does not give away control as well.
Making Outsourcing Work Better
In practice, a company that wants to maintain its independence while using outsourcers for key production functions will usually hold on to document creation, formatting, re-engineering, and any other post-composition work. This means that it will still have direct control over its customer data and the use of this data for transpromo activities. It will then take the normalized outputs from these operations and pass this over, in VPF form, to the chosen outsourcer.
For the printer, the use of the VPF standard means different data streams don’t arrive with their own collections of built-in quirks and oddities. For the company that’s outsourcing, it means the ability to switch work between print service providers to get the best deals and service, with an absolute minimum of downtime or disruption. For both of them, it means new ways of working, simple two-way information flows and a host of new opportunities.
Posted on Thu, Jun 09, 2011 @ 04:28 PM
Why Should A Bank Be A Printer?
Alongside automation, there is only one candidate for Industry Trend of the Year in 2011. Everywhere I look, I see more and more companies turning to outsourcing.
Yes, it’s partly because we are still suffering the aftermath of the recession. And it’s partly because online billing and e-commerce are cutting print volumes. But, even more importantly, it’s happening simply because big, clever, specialized corporations don’t want to be printers as well.
Many big organizations and financial institutions have developed highly sophisticated print and mailing operations over the years. Some have invested heavily and repeatedly in superb production and finishing machinery. But they are increasingly asking themselves why they are plowing so much money and effort into an area which is simply not their core competency.
Investment Projects On Hold
From where I stand, the signs could not have been clearer over the last few months.
I could name several major projects which were in the advanced planning stages at the end of 2010 that have now been put on hold, revised or stopped altogether, as the companies involved have rethought their priorities.
For the first time, even those with the most efficient, high volume transpromo operations are asking “What are we doing here? Why are we making this huge capital investment in very specific technologies which are just not relevant to our core business?” And the changes that are making them ask these provocative questions are the new opportunities and alternatives offered by outsourcing.
End-to-End Outsourcers, Captive Clients
In the old days – as recently as three or four years ago – there seemed to be just one model of outsourcing. The corporation handed over its data to the outsourcer and the outsourcer did the rest, taking responsibility for, and control of, the entire document supply chain from A to Z.
When it worked well, this was a good system. Whenever anything at all went wrong, it was awful. If the outsourcer failed to meet deadlines and SLAs, raised prices too high, introduced too many errors, or otherwise upset the client, the client would suddenly discover that it was virtually the print supplier’s prisoner. The outsourcer could always come up with some complicated technical explanation and blind the client with science. How was the client to know what was really happening halfway down the production process?
Even if the service provided was deemed wholly unsatisfactory, the client would be taking a big risk in pulling the business out of one supplier and placing it elsewhere, with all the disruption, delays, and potential for disaster that might involve.
Keeping Control Of The Gold
Now, however, there are alternatives. And one attractive alternative approach, which Sefas has been largely responsible for popularizing, is selective, partial outsourcing.
I call it, from the client’s point of view, “keeping control of your gold”. Because this is a way of doing outsourcing where the key data never passes out of the client’s control, and the client retains the whiphand, whatever twists and turns occur in the relationship.
It is this way of handling outsourcing that has led to the sudden surge of interest over the past few months. In my next posting, I’ll be taking a look at how it works and what it means to outsource the heavy lifting while keeping the gold – and the initiative – firmly under your own control.
Posted on Mon, Jun 06, 2011 @ 02:56 PM
Automation Makes the Future Brighter
By Bruno Henry, Chief Operating Officer, Sefas Innovation
There is not much doubt now that our industry is in the middle of the most exciting and challenging period of change in recent memory. New hardware, software, and ink technologies have brought us the benefits of high quality inkjet, brilliant color, and variable data printing. At the same time, we have had to adjust to a turbulent business environment in which projects are canceled, budgets are tight, costs are rising, and online delivery of everything from books to bills is rapidly reducing print volumes.
It’s more than just unnerving. We can all point to long-established companies that have run into difficulties, gone out of business, or been swallowed up by competitors. But there’s no reason to believe we’ll ever return to a golden age of stability. This is it. This is the world we have to survive and thrive in. And it is becoming clearer all the time that the only way to do that will be to embrace and exploit the technologies and circumstances around us.
Against this background, automation has emerged as a key success factor. No longer simply a matter of tripping switches and starting processes in the right order and at the right time, it has become the magic ingredient that ties together all the elements of today’s document resource planning (DRP) systems. Automation provides the brain and central nervous system that animates and coordinates the print production and mailing process. At its best, it enables existing systems procured at different times and from different manufacturers to work seamlessly and productively together, with minimal human intervention and a degree of precision that would otherwise be impossible.
The unseen power within modern automation systems is their ability to close the loop, to take in and act on feedback. Because information is flowing back up the system at the same time as instructions are sent down to the hardware in the front line, the system becomes flexible, responsive, capable of making on-the-fly adjustments and offering operations staff the ability to change priorities and manage situations without relying on guesswork.
With Open Print, for example, closed-loop processing systems monitor performance to keep the hardware operating at optimum levels. Live data is constantly fed back to the management dashboard, so that jobs can be moved up the queue and sophisticated, accurate workload balancing can be carried out, even in busy production units that deal with hundreds of jobs per shift. If this enables the production center to take on even one more job each night, that has an impact, across the year, that feeds straight through into the company’s profitability.
In a fully integrated plant, everything is automated and everything is visible. If one job is delayed to the point where SLAs and promises to the customer look like being breached, the Sefas software will recognize this and automatically alert operators to the situation. Urgent deadlines can be met by pulling individual jobs forward and slipping others that do not carry the same premium status.
The whole point of using a system that will integrate and automate production and mailing processes is to make sure that the machines serve the people and not the other way round. Managers see the information they need, when they need it, and have the power to make decisive changes when necessary.
Whenever a machine stops or human intervention is required, there is a lost opportunity. Production is halted, but overheads and staff costs continue to tick on upwards. So just keeping everything moving, while cutting out labor-intensive tasks, provides substantial gains. Realistically, too, however skilled your operations staff may be, every human intervention introduces the possibility of errors that will lead to costly reworking. There’s never been a printer yet who didn’t find reworking the most frustrating and disruptive part of the whole business. These days automated systems can not only cut out mistakes, but also automate the reprint process itself.
The gains to be won through end-to-end integrated automation are indisputable. Nobody seriously doubts them. So why do we not see it in every print production and mailing operation in the land? The answer is simply that real, practical, usable automation systems of this sort have not been around for long. There was plenty of excitable talk in the early days, followed by a lot of disappointing false starts and underperforming products that gave the whole concept something of a bad name. That bred skepticism, and it made the industry, as a whole, less inclined to believe that automation’s heady promises could be realized.
There were also very real problems concerned with the installation and implementation of automated systems. indeed, Sefas has won competitive bids for several large projects recently in which one of the key differentiators has been the speed and ease with which automation could be introduced.
This may sound trivial, but it is vitally important when you are dealing with busy, successful businesses that cannot stop production to allow for lengthy installation, adjustment and validation processes. The Sefas design philosophy, based on an overlay approach where automation modules are brought in to sit on top of the existing elements, has obvious advantages in terms of minimizing disruption and making the best possible use of capital equipment that may have represented several years-worth of major investments.
The aim of automation, of course, is to solve old problems without creating new ones. So fast, straightforward implementation was always one of our goals in the development of Open Print. The same philosophy was carried forward into the planning and design of the operator control panel. It is an intuitive, easily learned, browser-type interface that makes training quick and painless for all concerned.
As the pace of change accelerates and the new technologies change the nature of our job, there is no way back. Integrated automation is here to stay, and it will play an increasingly important role in determining the success or failure of individual businesses. Having seen how the Sefas Open Print approach can help improve profitability in a wide variety of print and mail operations, I am confident that the industry is on the right track. At last, and at least, it has the tools and resources it needs to deal with what lies ahead.
I invite you to subscribe to my blog, Taming The Document Supply Chain, for an ongoing discussion about print, progress and profits >>>
Posted on Mon, May 30, 2011 @ 02:16 PM
Automation Means Profits
Just before I get off the topic of automation, which has been dominating my thoughts for a while, I’d like to spell out one more time just how critical it can be to making print profitable.
The fundamental point is that every single time you remove an element of human intervention in the production process, you save time, you save money and you remove the chance of errors occurring and compliance problems creeping in.
The Aim Is To Print Non-Stop
The most obvious and spectacular day-to-day savings come where, for example, automation and high quality color digital printing allow you to avoid having to store and load letterheads or pre-printed forms.
The name of the game is to print as near non-stop as possible. So every time you have to change the paper or load a new letterhead, you are losing ground. Every time you restart the machine, there is a new opportunity for something to go haywire.
Calculating Your ROI
It’s quite possible to sit down and work out the actual return on investment that comes from introducing a system like Open Print that enables automation of existing manual and semi-manual processes.
You can easily put numbers on the increased machine throughput and savings in staff time that, together, mean you can take on extra jobs.
Avoiding Mistakes Saves Money, Too
What is harder to calculate is the likely loss, over time, that would have been caused by mistakes and compliance failures – the incidents that are avoided by using an automated system. We only know what these incidents cost when they happen to us. We will never know the cost of the ones we escaped.
All we know is that they can be very substantial. Insurers who mail out the wrong policy information and financial institutions that send the wrong retirement plans to the wrong people can face reprimands from regulators and even large fines.
Tactical Reactions, Strategic Progress
In my experience, it is frequently an accident like this that spurs a company into action. Anything that involves criticism by the regulator tends to show up fast in the boardroom, and the response is often an edict that says it must never happen again, almost irrespective of cost. Action follows swiftly, but the focus of management attention soon shifts elsewhere, as other problems sail over the horizon.
As a result, we often see large organizations making this strategic leap forward, toward an integrated, automated print production center, as a tactical response to a specific embarrassment.
The Biggest Gains May Be Unexpected
They capture the gains automation brings – greater capacity, faster turnaround times, higher staff productivity, better liaison with business users, improved document integrity, fewer mistakes and automated reprints – without necessarily realizing at first quite how significant the changes are going to be.
That’s OK with me. I don’t mind Sefas customers being agreeably surprised. If they discover, over the first few months of working with us, that they’re getting much more than they bargained for, I’ve never found that causes too much of a problem.