Don’t Wait! Recapture Hidden Money in Your Print and Mail Processes

This is a guest article from Solimar Systems, a valued BCC Software partner.

Print and mail processes inherently have areas where money can hide. What do we really mean by that? There are costs associated with the way print processes and the resulting mailing processes happen on your shop floor, some that you might not be aware of or have considered. The best illustration of this we talked about in a previous BCC Software article around merging your workflow and postal optimization efforts. Before we get there though, we should describe some of the areas where manual process, lack of optimization and the activities of workers mask real costs in an operation.

Areas where money hides:

• Job setup process
• Automation versus manual steps
• Address cleansing
• Job batches and the print engine performance impact
• Job comingling and householding for best mailing performance
• Knowing where a job is – whether it is complete or delivered
• Ability to meet postal discount and promotion requirements

To really uncover the above, we recommend that you regularly review the way work comes into your organization, gets produced, finished and sent into the mailstream. The workflow that drives your operations is of supreme importance; understanding how work progresses through your operation is the only way to optimize it and recapture costs. You might discover you didn’t even realize there was a cost factor in the way processes were being handled.

The actual value can be quite significant. If we revisit our previous BCC Software eBulletin article, Combining Workflow Management and Postal Optimization: A Case Study, you can really start to see the impact. In that article we shared the details for how our mutual BCC Software customer, ViaTech, saved 50 hours-a-day around just the print and mail processes. 3,000 minutes-a-day! That is what was being slowly chewed up by manual job setup processes and job re-setup processes that were not automated. Even if you take a rough estimate and calculate the cost as a single person that is paid a minimum wage of $12 an hour, that results in a $600 per day cost. In ViaTech’s case, by making changes in their processes they were able to move several people from these manual job tasks and on to more valuable tasks for the organization.

With automation and software, they could process faster, with less worker intervention and more accountability because of the Solimar and BCC Software systems provide reporting and visibility. Remember though, this is just one area we mention where you can try to recapture money that may not need to be spent as part of your current processes. It makes us ask, are you using postal optimization technology? Or are you using as much as you can?

Maybe it is time to get with your Solimar and BCC Software Representative, just like other clients have and challenge us to find new ways you can run your print and mail operation for reduced costs, better performance and ability to take on more work. You might even be able to offer new capabilities to your customers that translate into postal discounts. An example of this is leveraging Augmented Reality (AR) technology to achieve a 2% discount on mailings. While the program was updated for 2020, registration for this program is available now and you can learn more in our previous BCC Newsletter article.

What is important to know is this: all of the things you need to do to save money in your print and mail activities can be achieved through the Solimar and BCC Software partnership. And integration is a snap; just ask our mutual customers. In fact, it can be just a hot folder away. So, don’t delay – we would love to help you see less cost and more profit in 2020!