Are legacy processes holding your workflow back from pure nirvana?
Is your workflow, legacy software, and old equipment affecting your employees?
As 2022 is now upon us, challenges have continued to pile up for managers that are already dealing with “The New Normal”. Currently, we are less worried about people being out sick and more worried that they are just not going to show up and have joined the “great resignation train”.
Actively managing preferences for customer communications started in the early 2000’s with companies promoting electronic delivery (eDelivery) of statements, bills and explanation of benefits to reduce their print and mail spend. Since then, companies and consumers have been operating in a hybrid analog/digital world. For example, it wasn’t uncommon for companies to print and mail customer communications, fax them when requested, and email them too.
As the pandemic altered our everyday lives, organizations raced to implement digital transformation initiatives to facilitate Work from Home (WFH) policies and procedures in order to minimize business disruptions and ensure their employee’s safety. But in the haste to get digital initiatives implemented, were critical paper-based processes overlooked? How was the volume of ad-hoc or small batch correspondence that still needed to be physically mailed handled?
We are pleased to announce the release of CrawfordTech version DTE 4.12. DTE or Digital Transform Engine, which is the core software infrastructure used in all Crawford Technologies’ print and document conversion and enhancement solutions.
For years, decades really, legacy solutions have dominated the document storage and retrieval arena for customer communications management (CCM) documents. Although domination of this niche market seems to be changing, I think it’s important to fully understand what CCM means in this context.
When service providers look at their workflows, or consider implementing a modified or completely new workflow, many factors come into play. Automation is of course the ultimate goal. Increasing throughput, decreasing the number of labor-intensive human “touches”, and making it easier to handle exceptions are just a few of the many benefits that come from automation.
One of the biggest headaches experienced by printers today is managing the increasing number of small jobs. Companies that invested in equipment and software optimized for high volume production are seeing their operations become less efficient as they try to juggle the processing characteristics of multiple jobs that have shrunk in volume.
Job Onboarding. Those two words typically induce groans and frustrated grimaces amongst print operations managers. Even with all the workflow automation solutions available to streamline processes and reduce manual intervention, job onboarding remains one of the top workflow bottlenecks that impacts your profitability and your opportunities to win new clients and contracts. The easy answer to resolve this may be to add additional resources.
Most of us have heard the phrase “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Essentially it means don’t meddle with something that is functioning adequately. Perhaps that may be true with home projects, but adequate does not work in today’s competitive world of print and mail outsourcing. Print and mail service providers don’t win or keep jobs and clients when their tools, systems and processes are just adequate. But given the many other areas that need focus on a daily basis, it can be easy to just deal with processes and tools that “ain’t broke”.
