By: David Day, EDP, Product Marketing Manager
Saving money isn’t always about trimming five dollars here or two dollars there; sometimes it is about gaining efficiencies and productivity. This was the challenge laid down by the COO to Ron, the Operations Manager for MI Insurance’s in-plant print and mail operation. And the big question Ron now had to answer: Will Inkjet really save us money in our print and mail operations?
As Ron looked at his print and mail operation and the customer communications strategy there were a number of areas where he believed MII could see significant bottom line savings and process optimization. Ron understood that changing the way his organization approached the production and delivery of its standard printed and mailed communications, these efficiencies and savings goals would be realized.
While doing research, Ron discovered an article by a Subject Matter Expert from Crawford Technologies on 8 Sure Ways Leveraging Inkjet Will Save You Money. The article explains that when your operation moves to digital inkjet production printing, the way you approach your workflow and evaluate your print organization’s print jobs should evolve accordingly. The key point of the article was that you could continue to run your workflow almost the same way with your inkjet as you have with your legacy monochrome cut sheet processes, but you will be leaving a lot of money on the table. This seemed to get right to the heart of the COO’s question (and might convince the CFO and CIO as well).
Ron was intrigued. According to his research, when you add inkjet presses, a thorough analysis of your workflow and job mix should be conducted; the goal of this analysis is to uncover these potential operational improvements:
- Balancing of your print to minimize roll changeover
- Concatenation of small jobs for greater throughput and less wastage
- Managing jobs to optimize post-printing operations
- Maximizing your postal discounts
- Utilizing full color printing for more effective customer communications
- Minimizing complex changes to your legacy applications
- Taking advantage of postal discounts for use of color
- Reduction of costly inventory through adoption of white paper workflows
For Ron, the challenge became, “How do I monetize the benefits of inkjet to my organization?”
The answer is that, using the right workflow solution, optimized for digital inkjet presses, you can achieve many cost reductions. You can adjust your print jobs to match printer capabilities to gain production and quality improvements. You can optimize your print job sizes to match your roll sizes to eliminate frequent stopping and starting of the printer. By combining print jobs for optimal print runs and then break them into smaller jobs for post-production, you can achieve better throughput in both the print room and post-processing. By leveraging inkjet to run a plain paper or white paper factory you can reduce pre-printed forms and the costs associated with purchasing, storing and managing them. If you pass larger print runs to your postal optimization software you can yield greater mail densities and less postal costs, even without sending you mailings to a pre-sort house.
Somehow, Ron knew listing the operational improvements was the easy part. Achieving those improvements would take a strategy and a solution that would provide the capabilities needed to leverage these eight process improvements of an inkjet investment.
Before reporting back to the COO, Ron decided to attend an educational on-demand webinar developed by the subject matter experts at Crawford Technologies. If the benefits aligned with MII’s goals, the next step would be to book a meeting with them to determine the real impact that a Crawford solution could have on MII’s inkjet investment and customer communications workflow.
If the above sounds like something you are experiencing in your organization, we invite you to attend our on-demand webinar: A Day in the Life of an Operations Manager. Through this webinar you will learn how the eight ways mentioned above can revolutionize the production and delivery of your customer communications.
