Reprint from Output Links: The second of a six-part series on customer communications management and optimizing the mailstream

Special Interests: Customer Communication Management Series
Unlock the profitability in your mailstream.

27 June 2006

Revenue and Relevance through
Intelligence in the Mailstream

Part Two: Print Operations Gain Efficiencies and Flexibility with
Enterprise Output Management

By John Schloff
Vice President of Strategy, Product Management and Marketing
Pitney Bowes Document Messaging Technologies

As organizations continue to move toward total communications intelligence, improvements in customer data management and closed loop reporting have boosted the performance of call centers and online customer self service. But there is another customer touch point where applying more intelligence can have a huge effect -- print.

Intelligence in printing can increase efficiency with automated re-prints, improve performance against tight deadline SLAs with improved flexibility, and move an operation ever closer to “perfect mail” with comprehensive tracking and reporting. It’s part of what’s called Enterprise Output Management (EOM) and it’s a powerful performance driver.

Traditionally print operations have been considered a back office cost center -- a necessary part of doing business. It’s been about printing bills, statements, policies, or other important customer documents in the shortest time and at the lowest cost.

The conventional approach of separating the phases of document development and production has created operational silos – data, IT, marketing, print operations, billing, and customer services. It’s time for an all-encompassing end-to-end ROI standard that reflects the implementation of integrated customer communication management (CCM) to optimize every step in the cycle.

Beyond cost-per-page, what is the true ROI for print operations? For instance, what is the cost in time and labor for reprints? How about delays incurred from being unable to quickly switch between printer types? What is the business impact of billing delays caused by production problems? What does it cost for poor formatting and inaccuracies? Are traditional statement inserts pulling their weight, or would a more focused and timely “onsert” offer a better payback? How much more revenue can be generated from powerful, timely personalized marketing messages printed in color directly on the statement?

These questions and more are shifting the executive mind-set from, “what do our print operations cost?” to “what should our print operations offer?”

Enterprise Output Management: transforming drains into gains
Transactional mail is a critical periodic link to customers and a tremendous opportunity to create a positive impact on your brand and business. Adding intelligence to this print production stage of the CCM cycle can bring efficiency and integrity to this process.

For decades, print operations have used piecemeal workflow technologies that create discrete print streams and direct them to specific printers. Operations managers often find it difficult to acquire knowledge of overall workflow, production priorities and available printers. There’s no ability to perform last-minute reprints or changes without going back into the composition system. Nor is there centralized reconciliation for all jobs; instead, many systems must be called up and counted virtually by hand. Accounting becomes fragmented and slow because there is no tracking of pages being printed.

We need the enterprise-wide view that allows centralized control of printing operations. Enterprise Output Management -- like that offered by Emtex®, a Pitney Bowes company -- features centralized printing on an enterprise-wide system. Multiple technological and functional silos are replaced with a single, open platform that allows access to information and control of print operations by all appropriate users across the enterprise. By centrally handling accounting, reprints, asset utilization, ADF workflow, localized reprints and more, efficiencies quickly add up.

What can we expect from EOM?
Better reconciliation, for one. A centralized EOM system opens an all-encompassing operational vista for complete, real-time reporting of what’s printed and when. When virtually 100% document integrity must be maintained in the ADF, audits must be performed to ensure the right pages hit the right envelopes every time. This can be a slow, manual process performed against strict deadlines. Now we can use automated document tracking that records integrity data pertinent to the operation. This includes customer account numbers, outstanding balances and address postal codes. It is fed into an auditing or financial system for faster reconciliations.

Reprints have always been a challenge for print operations managers. Pages damaged during printing or finishing affect the integrity of the entire document. This usually entails a time-consuming, mostly manual process to identify the specific damaged page, collecting reprint requests and instructing the host application to resend pages or reprint the entire job. Automatic reprinting determines which pages are damaged, automatically regenerates them and then reprints them through the existing print line.

Print stream management is another area ripe for streamlining. Running in the automated document factory, EOM solutions provide the ability to transform print streams on an any-to-any basis, and the ability to index, sort, split, merge and condition print streams on demand, on the fly.

EOM handles diverse printers, platforms, mainframes, and job runs. Here flexibility rules. For example, what happens if, in mid-run, an IBM® printer needs servicing or swapping over to another job and its run needs to be switched to a differently configured H-P® model? An open control platform can do it on the fly without reengineering. This same any-to-any capability can extend to virtually any device, or even paper material, within the print stream.

“Affordable transformation” is not an oxymoron
Significant gains can be extracted from print operations. Many operations have legacy systems running applications that are 20 or 30 years old. The key is using existing hardware and implementing software that opens the way to automated document tracking and reprinting, improved production management, better document clarity and powerful marketing impact through color and personalized messaging.

Many companies are protecting their investments in their legacy systems and procedures by taking advantage of a flexible staged transformation to EOM. This minimizes, or can even avoid, disruptions to on-going operations while ramping up to a full EOM system in the future.

Whether the transformation is radical or evolving, intelligence through EOM is a competitive edge in the customer communication management value chain. About the author John Schloff is Vice President of Strategy, Product Management and Marketing for Pitney Bowes Document Messaging Technologies. He has provided thought leadership on how Customer Communications Management optimizes the mailstream to create cost savings and increased revenues. IBM, H-P and Emtex are registered trademarks of their respective companies.

About the author
John Schloff is Vice President of Strategy, Product Management and Marketing for Pitney Bowes Document Messaging Technologies. He has provided thought leadership on how Customer Communications Management optimizes the mailstream to create cost savings and increased revenues.

IBM, H-P and Emtex are registered trademarks of their respective companies.