Want to be more efficient? Reduce capital expenses? Be more compliant and secure? Every business does, and it’s possible to achieve those things by transitioning from in-house production to working with a transactional print and mail company. To outsource print and mail in this category, you’ll need a defined workflow.
Otherwise, you may encounter challenges and delays. PCI Group has been helping companies switch their operations for over a decade. We’re sharing what we’ve learned and what we know works.
1. Do Your Due Diligence on Providers
First and foremost, you need to pick the right partner to outsource print and mail. In the transactional environment, you have much different criteria to consider versus printers for general or promotional communications.
These letters have regulatory requirements that involve adhering to compliance, ensuring data security, establishing accuracy, and delivering repeatable quality. Your evaluation of these companies needs to be far-reaching, typically with an RFP (request for proposal) process.
You should ask lots of questions about their operations and how they meet compliance regulations. Every part of the process needs a microscope atop it, so that you can be confident in turning over this work to them.
They should have extensive experience in transitions and a team of dedicated staff to ensure the move is a success. Tour their facilities and have conversations with their leadership. Once you have checked all your boxes, the real work begins, and they should be your guides.
2. Build a Team of Stakeholders
Before beginning the action steps, you and your provider will build an implementation team. From their side, these roles would include technical, compliance, operational, customer service, and leadership members. On your side, you’ll need to bring in those with responsibility over current operations, transactional communications, and project planning.
Your new partner will advise you of other necessary individuals, including technical or operational experts.
3. Work with Your Partner to Assess Your Current Workflows
Once you’ve formed a working relationship, the next step is a deep dive into your processes. You’ll be revealing this to your new partners, identifying your known gaps and obstacles.
Their eyes on your processes will likely turn up other areas for improvement. Moving from your production to theirs will likely involve new equipment and technology that’s more advanced than what you have. It’s their core competency, not yours, and this creates opportunities for tightening up and modernizing workflows.
You may decide to scrap most of what you’re doing now once they introduce you to what’s possible. The purpose of this step is to architect how things will run moving forward. It’s a team effort with a lot of input from different folks who have different perspectives.
You’ll design a plan, but it can evolve. There’ll be time to amend it should you encounter a barrier. In general, you should constantly be optimizing processes, so think of this as a living document.
4. Finalize the Project Plan and Communicate It
Once everyone signs off on the project plan, it’s critical to put a timeline against it. Depending on the volume and complexity of your mailings, this could take between four and eight weeks.
The completed project plan should include:
- Objectives
- Major tasks and the subtasks beneath them
- Task owners
- Task dependencies
- Milestones
- Dates for each deliverable
- Who needs to sign off on each task and/or milestone
- Contingencies should issues arise
This will all roll up into one big schedule provided to each team member. At this time, you’ll also set your regular check-in meetings to discuss progress and any blockers.
5. Start Task Work
With each group and person having their marching orders, the transition to outsourcing begins. You’ve developed what the new process looks like from the moment you send data to the provider, through manufacturing, to the mail stream and delivery.
Now, it’s time to put all the pieces in place to make this workflow a reality. During task work, there will likely be snags that happen. As long as you, as a team, address them early, they won’t slow things down.
6. Test Everything
With workflows built and standardizations made, it’s time to run tests. Your provider should do thorough testing in every way. Those should involve:
- Data integrity
- Quality assurance
- Compliance checks
- Security reviews
- Accuracy ratings
Additionally, if you’re using features like address scrubbing or have special mailing needs like Certified Mail, you want to do tests on these, too.
If you’ll be using any type of customer portal to access data and reporting on your jobs, those who need it will receive access and training.
7. Ramp Up and Go Live
Once testing is complete and everyone is comfortable with the results, the next step is ramping up production in a controlled way with internal teams watching carefully. If there are no red flags, this can build to being live and having all your communications run through your partner.
8. Follow Up and Review
Your implementation and transition to outsourcing are complete! However, it doesn’t mean your provider stops checking in. They’ll follow up with you regularly for at least the first three months, and you’ll have customer service team members to support you with day-to-day questions or needs.
Continuous optimization of processes is something smart print and mail companies do, and you’ll benefit from those. With the integration of more automation and sophisticated technology, you can expect a product that’s accurate, reliable, high-quality, secure, and compliant.
Are you ready to outsource print and mail? We make it easy with a proven formula. Find out how by talking to our team today.
