For those industries that produce transactional print and mail products, you know it’s a complex process. There are many components to get right—quality, accuracy, and compliance. If you’ve begun to reconsider your operations and move toward outsourcing, you’ll want to evaluate prospective partners in many ways. One thing you should look for is a print and mail Lean Manufacturing partner. Organizations that follow this strategy can deliver many benefits.
Let’s review what Lean is and why it’s so critical in transactional documents.
What Is Lean Manufacturing?
Lean Manufacturing is synonymous with removing waste from a process. In this strategy, manufacturers develop rigorous controls around consistency and quality. Eliminating waste is the objective, which can fall under time, labor, inventory, and inefficiency. It’s an approach to delivering repeatable value.
Lean has specific pillars that an organization must undertake to align with the method, including:
- Continuous improvement mindset
- Measuring the efficiency and effectiveness of processes to understand and improve them.
- Being proactive in preventing errors.
- Optimizing the complete process.
- Standardization of repeatable processes to eliminate errors.
There are two more critical areas of Lean: 5S and standard works.
5S
5S relates to these five practices:
- Sort: Remove anything necessary from the space.
- Set-in-Order: Organize what workers need for the task at hand so it’s easily accessible.
- Shine: Keep workstations clean.
- Standardize: Establish guidelines that all items must repeat.
- Sustain: Maintain standards of workspaces based on the 4S.
Standard Works
Standard works describe the documentation of the tasks in sequence to complete a process. Standardizing these contributes to less waste and fewer errors. They will evolve over time, so they are living documents.
With a Lean Manufacturing framework, a print and mail company bolsters its quality control and assurance programs. It also supports accuracy and compliance.
Print and Mail Lean Manufacturing: The Value for You
Deciding to outsource your transactional mail, from billing statements to healthcare communications to collection letters, has many advantages. You’ll save money and remove the burden from your internal team. You may have apprehensions about quality, accuracy, and compliance, but those implementing Lean excel at these. Here’s why.
You can count on quality.
The quality of your letters matters. You want to ensure that these represent your brand faithfully and always look professional. Lean builds quality into every aspect of production. In Lean, an organization shifts from inspection to prevention, identifying issues early. Constant auditing of the processes means that quality is always monitored.
You’ll worry less about accuracy.
Getting the right paper into the correct envelope seems simple, but at high volumes with automated workflows, mis-mailings can occur. The best way to mitigate this is by leveraging Lean principles of continuous improvement.
Transactional print and mail companies, like PCI Group, use sophisticated and intelligent insertion along with 2D barcodes printed on each piece and scanned with mini cameras to preserve accuracy. Embracing Lean helped develop these protocols and keep them consistent. We know this to be true because we’ve achieved a 99.9999% accuracy rating.
You’ll be confident in compliance.
The third benefit you’ll realize by working with a Lean Manufacturing organization is more robust compliance practices. The accuracy components described above align with compliance measures regarding privacy and confidentiality. Additionally, compliance has a lot to do with guidelines around the process and ensuring delivery within a timeframe, if applicable.
Lean Manufacturing assists here as well, with its streamlined workflows that don’t deviate. The process follows the rules dependably, which means there’s less risk of a delay.
PCI Group: Print and Mail Lean Manufacturing Experts
Becoming a Lean Manufacturing environment was a deliberate move to deliver the best quality, the most accuracy, and the highest level of compliance. It’s made our operations seamless and empowered our team to perfect processes, which is valuable to our company and yours. Find out more about how Lean gives you an advantage by contacting us today.
