Have you ever thought about accuracy in terms of competitive advantage? Maybe you should.

I have a background of producing highly personalized transactional documents such as bank statements, checks, or insurance forms. Working with items such as these, accuracy was pretty much a given. We went to great lengths to make sure that every document got printed, inserted, and mailed to the right recipient. A mixed statement, where pages for more than one recipient got into the same envelope, were rare occurrences. Given the volume we produced and the technology that was available at the time, we did a pretty good job.

Today, an accuracy rate of 99% may not be good enough. Especially if your competitors can prove that they can do better. Most service providers can't afford to lose accounts because of an inability to produce accurate results that meet their customer expectations. And in-plant operations who make too many mistakes can find their functions quickly outsourced to organizations who claim to have a better handle on quality control.

An Upgrade May be Necessary

Today's Automated Document Factory (ADF) hardware and software can turn any print and mail operation into a state of the art, highly accurate facility capable of running complex jobs like variable-page statements or matching. And it might be possible to implement this technology at a lower price than you thought.

Newer inserting systems have built-in sensors and intelligence designed to improve integrity. But if a large capital investment for inserting equipment isn't in the cards, your fully-depreciated 30-year old swing arm inserter may be able to meet your needs adequately with bolt-on solutions that include cameras and control systems. There are no excuses anymore for the inability to track document production within your shop or failing to verify that every piece went out. In fact, those functions are quickly becoming an expected baseline capability.

Besides being able to provide a level of service that meets or exceeds that of your competitors, ADF technology can also lower your operating costs and raise productivity. Many shops have used job-level tracking and statistics compiled by ADF software to identify previously unrecognized bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and operator training deficiencies. Correcting these issues leads to less re-work and increased productivity. Overtime is reduced and sometimes even an entire shift can be eliminated. Automated reconciliation at the end of a job decreases non-productive time. And automated sequence-checking can reduce labor by eliminating the need for fanning the mail to do visual inspections.

Being able to accurately process more work with less labor, without a large capital expense can put organizations in a position to provide better service at reasonable prices. At a time when customers are expecting better results from their investment in physical documents, all these benefits are an important part of the picture. Discovering the best approaches and helping to integrate them into the workflow is one of the main reasons organizations bring us in to help them. Frequently our customers say they don't know where to start. Fortunately we do.

Insuring accuracy in mailed communications may seem to be a dry internal concern. It doesn't need to be that way. Turning internal quality control into recognizable customer benefits can help you keep your current customers and attract new ones