Sefas' Bruno Henry

Sefas' Bruno Henry: Just Months to Payback

  

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I was talking, in my last posting, about the document supply chain – about how we should be integrating the sourcing, processing and distribution of data like the supermarkets do with the food supply chain.

It makes sense, in general terms, so I guess you won’t disagree that that’s the way we should be going. But it’s a big shift.

The “food” in this supply chain is the data, and most of us haven’t really adjusted yet to the idea that it really is the data that sits at the center of this digital world.

It was different before. When it was a paper world, the center of that world seemed to be the large mechanical inserters that shoved documents into envelopes.

Now the center of the world is the data. And it has moved the key point of the process back up the supply chain, from the inserter, to the printer, and right back to the composition and creation stage.

It’s no longer the big, clunky, noisy machine that determines the success of your efforts to communicate. It’s the data that counts – and how you control and manipulate it.

If you want to know how that makes a difference and saves you money, let’s take a very familiar example.

The moment you’re doing large volumes of transactional documents, most of the cost is for the mailing. So all large volume transactional printers pre-sort the mail before it gets to the post office to minimizing postage. You know that. But just moving the intelligent pre-sorting of your information back to the data level, rather than at the printer or the inserter, can bring you really substantial savings.

I’ll give you some examples in my next blog, but we could be talking about overall payback periods as short as six to nine months.

And there are not many software systems in the world that can pay for themselves in half a year.