In any type of print outsourcing, you can face risks and opportunities for improvement. In the compliance-focused world of transactional print and mail, you must be confident in the provider’s ability to be accurate, reliable, compliant, and secure. Can managed print services cover all that?
The right provider will minimize risk while improving quality. You’ll also reap considerable savings from migrating to an outsourcing model.
What Are Managed Print Services in Transactional Communications?
The key descriptor is “managed,” which describes the responsibility and ownership of your print and mail partner. They manage the entire workflow, from receipt of data to composition to printing through mailing and tracking. You can outsource everything you’re doing in-house to a single organization.
Managed print services remove many burdens from you and shift them to experts in the world of transactional communications.
How Does Migrating to Managed Print Services Occur?
The process of going from an in-plant operation to outsourcing can be complex. You’ll want to understand what implementation, testing, and onboarding look like and the requirements of your staff.
Successful migrations are those in which your new provider has lots of experience. You don’t want to be their first customer to go through the process. When considering moving to the managed services model, gather all the details about their action plans.
We use the Lean Manufacturing Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) principle that includes:
- Defining the scope of the project and identifying stakeholders
- Providing recommendations for improvements from current to future state
- Creating and communicating the project plan with specifics for milestones, timelines, and task owners
- Regular stakeholder reviews and updates
- Testing overseen by our Quality and Implementation teams
Our customers also have access to a dedicated implementation manager. Once they go live, we assign a dedicated customer service representative.
The time to implement depends on the complexity of your print and mail workflows. Because we’ve helped organizations do this for years, we have proven practices that make it streamlined and worry free for customers.
Managed Print Services Motivations: Saving Money and Improving Quality
When companies decide to outsource, there are typically two motivations: saving money and improving quality. It’s a misconception to think these things can’t happen in concert. You should never have to sacrifice quality to reduce your costs.
How Managed Print Services Deliver Savings
You’ll be able to remove capital expenditures and operational costs when you outsource. The categories include:
- Equipment, machinery, and technology: You can completely eliminate these.
- Overhead costs: Mark off all the expenses related to operating the space, including rent, insurance, security, and utilities.
- Labor: Those working in your in-plant can move to other roles, and you can remove overtime wages, which are often necessary for ensuring timely mailings.
- Inventory: Take advantage of a professional printer’s volume, which correlates to purchasing paper, ink, and other supplies at a lesser cost.
- Postage: Commercial printers leverage automation, presorting, and commingling to achieve the lowest rates.
- Efficiency: Your current processes may include inefficiencies that cost you time and money, such as having to switch out templates or manual efforts. A strategically engineered workflow with built-in automation ensures such things are no longer a concern.
The final expenses you’ll have with managed print services are more budgetable. You have piece rates as part of your contract. The only thing that may change is postage, as USPS typically raises these twice annually.
Quality Is a Top Priority for Managed Print Providers
In transactional managed print, quality is not something you can simply hope works out. It’s critical that it’s the root of all your processes. If failures occur here, you’ll find yourself at risk of non-compliance and reputational harm.
So, how does quality weave into such massive operations? In our model, we follow Lean Manufacturing and its philosophy to reduce waste, audit processes, continuous improvement, and deliver quality with repeatable, standardized processes.
A considerable part of our quality program is standard works. These list every task in sequence for the process to be accurate and error-free. Our operators collaborate to create these, and we audit them routinely.
Lean also means we focus on quality assurance (QA) versus quality control (QC).
QA vs. QC
For quality to be consistent, it must be reliable. A QA model is the continuous activity of auditing the processes and refining them to be stronger. With QC, there’s no way to correct the error because production is complete. Watch this Ask the Expert video to learn more about QA vs. QC.
Hand-in-hand with quality are security, compliance, and accuracy. All these components must be present in managed print services. Your partner should maintain the appropriate compliance certifications, including SOC I & II, HIPAA, HITRUST, PCI-DSS, and FISMA.
They should also integrate the highest standards for physical and data security. They should be proactive in their strategies to protect data in the cyber world and in their facilities.
Finally, they should have advanced technology, equipment, and processes to uphold accuracy. One mis-mailing can have concerning consequences.
We’re dedicated to all these things, going beyond the standards and norms. As a result of our efforts, we have an industry-leading 99.9999% accuracy rate.
Ready to Reduce Costs and Boost Quality with Managed Print Services?
You can realize so many benefits by outsourcing. Keep in mind that not every print and mail provider is equal. Rely on an organization with decades of experience focusing solely on transactional communications—PCI Group.
Get started today by requesting a no-cost consultation with our experts.
