For organizations that send transactional communications to customers, members, or patients, managing it in-house is increasingly more expensive and complex. Because these mailings must adhere to rules and regulations and be delivered quickly, keeping up requires greater investment. However, you can partner with a provider for transactional print management to better address these complexities.
When you work with a company dedicated to transactional print and mail, the relationship satisfies business continuity, security, and compliance needs. Let’s discuss how.
What Is Transactional Print Management?
Transactional print management refers to outsourcing regulated communications that include either PII (personally identifiable information) or PHI (protected healthcare information) to a capable vendor. In this scenario, the print company manages all the components of your letters, from securely receiving the data to processing to tracking in the mail stream.
Many organizations are moving to this model to reduce costs and streamline operations. Those are often significant motivations. However, you may have concerns about how these companies handle business continuity, security, and compliance. Not all commercial printers have the infrastructure and processes in place to support these requirements.
Transactional Print Management Delivers Benefits Beyond Savings
In addition to reduced costs for your print and mail, you need assurance that the work itself will meet your needs around business continuity, security, and compliance. These are attributes that are part of the foundation of PCI Group. Here’s how our services deliver on these critical components
Business Continuity with Managed Print
Transactional letters always have a timeline associated with their dispersion to the mail stream. In the case of statements and invoices, your customers must receive these in a timely manner to avoid delay in payment. Other communications have regulated timeframes in which recipients must get them, such as collection letters or healthcare notifications.
As a result, you can’t afford for there to be any downtime to interrupt these. Not all printers have a sophisticated business continuity model. They may have some backup mechanisms or outsource to another printer. This kind of coverage can be risky because it’s likely not ready to respond immediately to an outage. In the case of a vendor outsourcing to another, you don’t know what that organization’s capabilities are.
What should you be seeking to ensure business continuity? Our plan includes a comprehensive Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity Plan. We operate fully redundancy facilities which use the same equipment, same technology and same workflows. If there’s an issue at one location, the other can immediately take over the job.
Additionally, we have a multi-tiered redundancy system to reduce the possibility of interruption with operational strategies for recovery and business continuity. We also maintain on-site equipment to support this, including a fire water storage tower and diesel generators, the capability to print, insert, and mail customer documents through a hot site, and a full building UPS battery backup system.
To compare options when evaluating providers, request a copy of their plan, its specifics, and how often they test it.
Transactional Print Management and Security
When you outsource transactional print and mail, you must be confident in the security features of the provider. This involves both data and physical security. There is inherent risk in dealing with PII and PHI, but the best transactional companies have layers and layers of protection to uphold security best practices and regulations.
We deliver security peace of mind by:
- Establishing data transmission through an SFTP connection that moves files to our secure network
- Processing data through a proprietary file hub SECURE IT, which meets or exceeds compliance with SOC 1, SOC 2, HIPAA, HITRUST, FISMA, and PCI-DSS regulations
- Using the latest encryption software and full disk encryption
- Network segmentation to divide the primary network into smaller ones with security controls
- Multi-factor authentication
- Physical security measures of controlled access to facilities, badge access systems, 24-7 camera monitoring, door alarms, and secure property perimeters
If you’re planning to move operations from in-house to a provider, you should inquire about all their security measures and scrutinize for any potential gaps.
Compliance in Managed Printing Solutions
Compliance is everything in transactional print and mail. Without reliable, repeatable practices that ensure it, you can’t accomplish any other requirement. However, finding a company to produce your communications should involve more than certifications. That should be your baseline—compliance with all the regulations that matter.
Beyond meeting these requirements, you want a partner with compliance in their DNA. It’s a characteristic we proudly hold because all we do is transactional jobs. Our deeply rooted compliance program guides all the work that we do. We have a dedicated Compliance Officer and a team focusing only on this. We regularly test compliance through third-party auditing.
One key to compliance is accuracy. One mis-mailing can be a critical error. We’ve honed accuracy by leveraging intelligent inserters, barcodes for verification scanned by mini cameras, and Lean Manufacturing techniques. As a result, we have an accuracy rating of 99.9999%.
Every workflow we build and execute has compliance considerations in the design. We’re serious about meeting all regulatory mandates to protect you from fines or reputational harm.
Print Management from PCI Group
If you’ve decided to outsource transactional communications, you’ll find we’re a secure, compliant, and accurate partner. Get started today by requesting a free consultation.
