Monday, June 3, 2013

Strategy for Improved Profitability within Print & Mail Operations

Within print and mail operations, it is common to see excessive overhead and production delays squeeze profitability from document processors.  Common areas of lost profitability include:  
$       Paying higher postage for jobs which run late
$       Paying unscheduled overtime to complete jobs in order to meet contract deadlines
$       Stopping production to find missing pieces and reconcile jobs/pieces on the plant floor
$        Operators utilizing production time to enter production data and manually close out jobs (rather than running production)
$        Manually entering production data in to spreadsheets and reporting programs
$        Paying late delivery fees and compliance penalties
$        Introducing duplicate pieces and extra postage into the production cycle
$        Manual re-print processes which require excessive labor and production resources
$        Waste and spoilage within printing, finishing and inserting processes
An effective piece and job tracking strategy can measurably eliminate these expenses while providing management with REAL TIME, desktop transparency to:
Ø  Status of jobs versus production schedules and SLA’s
Ø  Immediate notification of integrity issues such as missing & duplicate pieces
Ø  Elimination of manual process transitions, operator logging/reporting and manual data entry to record production information
Ø  Enable jobs to be completed on-time without excessive postage costs and overtime charges
Ø  Production performance dashboard including productivity benchmarking
Ø  Automated reprint process
Ø  Compliance audit trails
Today’s job and piece tracking systems provide a strategy to measurably optimize profitability and integrity performance, regardless of the equipment types and information management architecture in a production facility.
By Pat Hoskins, pat.hoskins@ironsidestech.com, PH 585.953.3013