The complex processes, high costs, and security and compliance mandates make it difficult for a business to manage transactional communications. They often face challenges that impact many other things downstream. If it’s not a core competency, it becomes an obstacle. However, companies don’t have to continue this cycle. They can depend on companies like PCI Group for full-service printing, mailing, and document solutions.
With a trusted expert partner, you can be confident in outsourcing, which can improve security, compliance, and quality.
What Is Full-Service Printing, Mailing, and Document Solutions?
As the descriptor confirms, the entire workflow is full-service. A transactional print and mail company handles every task related to producing, sending, and archiving your letters. Here’s a quick preview of how it works:
- Companies securely send the data to their provider, most often as fully composed PDF files, but also can be text based
- The print and mail company receives the information and begins file-processing tasks, including data scrubbing, identification of any missing information, and deduplication.
- Businesses receive a PDF approval file.
- After approval, the production of the letters begins with security, compliance, and quality checks.
- After printing, documents are inserted into the correct envelopes.
- Letters hit the mail stream and are trackable through delivery.
- Documents then reside in a secure archive.
From data upload to letter delivery to document management, all you need for these mailings are available with full-service solutions.
Advantages of Full-Service Transactional Mail and Print
Why should your organization transition to an outsourcing model? It’s a question with many answers, as you can realize significant benefits. These support your business objectives and meet customer expectations.
Reduce Costs
Looking for ways to decrease capital and operating expenses? Every company is, and that’s truer now than ever. Producing transactional print and mail costs are rising, and every dollar spent there can’t be used for growth initiatives and other budget needs.
You can significantly reduce costs by taking advantage of full-service printing, mailing, and document solutions. First, you eliminate the expenses of machinery, technology, labor, and overhead.
Second, you’ll pay less for materials like paper, ink, and toner. That’s because print companies buy these in bulk and have special contracts. Even with the threat of higher prices due to the economic environment, they will always get a better deal.
Third, your postage will decrease. Print and mail houses use a variety of postage optimization strategies to receive the best rates. They employ these tactics:
- Address scrubbing to eliminate duplicates and correct wrong addresses, minimizing undeliverable mail
- High-volume presorting and commingling groups of mail
- USPS Intelligent Mail® barcode (IMb) for automation
Your overall savings could be in the five digits, helping you redistribute that funding to other areas of the business.
Improve Security and Compliance
Transactional communications are unique and must follow certain data security and compliance guidelines. Since they contain PII (personally identifiable information), PHI (protected healthcare information), or both, they require lots of oversight of the processes.
Much of this relies on strategies like Lean Manufacturing coupled with advanced technology. Overlaid across all of these are robust compliance measures.
Examples of how outsourcing improves security and compliance:
- Using SFTP (Secure File Transmission Protocol) for data transfers
- Encrypting data while in transit at rest
- Multi-factor authentication
- Standard works for every aspect of the workflow for consistency
- Firewalls and IPS (Intrusion Prevention System)
- Network traffic segmentation
- User-level security
- Dedicated resources solely focused on compliance
Since these companies only produce transactional print and mail, these security and compliance measures cover every job. With these in place, you’ll also experience better accuracy.
Strengthen Accuracy
Along with security and compliance, improved accuracy is another benefit. Mis-mailings can cause havoc. Depending on the scale, you could face noncompliance fines, legal action, and reputational harm.
While 100% accuracy isn’t feasible, PCI Group comes pretty close, with its industry-leading 99.9999%. We’re able to achieve this because of our LEAN manufacturing processes, which we continue to audit and improve.
Another foundation of our near-perfect accuracy is our use of intelligent insertion. Each envelope must contain only the pages for that addressee. It seems simple, but it’s the weakest part of the workflow.
Intelligent insertion works by using 2D barcodes on each piece of paper read by cameras. This barcode tells the inserter which ones go into the envelope. There’s a validation aspect, too, as a separate camera records an image of the insertion.
Full-Service Printing, Mailing, and Document Solutions: A Smart Move
It’s time to rethink your transactional print and mail model. Costs will continue to rise. Threats to security and compliance will, as well. Gaps in accuracy could result in a major breach. By working with our team, these worries can fade. You’ll always have control and insight into each job, so there’s complete transparency and visibility.
Begin your new journey to full-service support by requesting a no-cost consultation.
