Disaster recovery programs are a best practice for any company and operational process. In print and mail, organizations need a backup plan to continue production should an outage occur. Unfortunately, traditional disaster recovery programs often don’t meet the needs of a company, so PCI Group sought to do something different with the ACTIV dR program. In this episode of Ask the Experts, PCI Group’s Area VP, Solutions Partner Scott Concannon, explains the differences.
“Our Vision for ACTIV dR, when we brought it to the marketplace five years ago, was to be an essential partner to other in-plant operations doing mission-critical business documents. We wanted to see some type of regular pattern to client files so that we have familiarity,” Scott explained.
ACTIV dR is an always-on, active, hot site solution, deployable quickly and cost-effectively. It includes processing a small portion of customer work and regularly rotates through all customer applications. As a result, the program enables active processing of current work from receipt of data to mailing. This approach also includes periodic testing to ensure the operation is up-to-date with any client changes.
Most organizations with an in-plant believe they only need a cold site should an event occur to halt their operations. From that question, PCI Group took a fresh perspective. “We stopped and said that doesn’t fit our model. We’re not comfortable because we’re not familiar enough with your workflows, processes, and files,” Scott shared.
By asking these questions, customers have changed their point of view on this and have seemed the wisdom of our approach. “Really, the difference between our ACTIV warm approach versus a traditional cold approach is that we have no declaration fee, no subscription fee. We are only paid for the work we do,” Scott said.
In the end, PCI Group seeks to be a client’s partner, not just a vendor. With the ACTIV dR program, a partnership is the foundation.
