According to a recent study on best practices that was completed by the respected analysts at Madison Advisors, there is a large portion of the document industry that is getting by without the benefit of some of the basic components of a production workflow. This information confirms our own observations and conversations we've had with clients, prospective clients, and others in the document business.

Regular readers of this newsletter, or my book, "Take This Job and Stuff It! - A Practical Guide for Document Operations Managers" know that I'm not an advocate of spending tons of money to develop full-blown automated document factories. Every shop doesn't need to have a fully integrated and automated production facility to adequately meet the needs of their customers.

But that doesn't mean that you can continue to run a document center without some systematic or automatic controls. This becomes crucial as the documents you process become more personalized, more targeted, and therefore more valuable. I think it's inevitable that a good portion of the post-recession documents that get produced are going to be more complex. Document processing organizations that can't create and distribute these critical documents with the accuracy, integrity, and security that is required will see their work sent to some other shop that can meet those requirements. You could find yourself outsourced or out of business.

If you're not already a customer of ours, Print/Mail Consultants can provide you the same type of advice. No one expects you to handle a complicated and revolutionary change in requirements - brought on by a worldwide economic crisis - without expert help! Call us about facilitating the intradepartmental communication, assessing your capabilities, and researching solutions.

Get your house in order
But just as important, you'll want to streamline your processes, cut out any unnecessary workarounds that may have been developed over the years, and take a good hard look at the documents you produce. Relevancy and accuracy can frequently be improved. Most companies find this task difficult to do on their own. There are too many political issues, they don't feel empowered to make changes, or they've become so accustomed to the way things are that they can't see them any other way. In every case where we've been asked to help, Print/Mail Consultants, as an outside third party, has overcome all those obstacles and helped our clients achieve real changes.

The manual, semi-manual, or unconnected production workflow methods that may have been sufficient in the past could be a source of frustration, delay, or errors in the future. If you're planning on delivering topnotch service past 2010, you will likely have to make some changes.

There will never be a better time to initiating those changes than right now. Before you close this email I encourage you to take some action; pick up the phone, write an email, or schedule a meeting, but do something to get started right away.

Sincerely,