Dear ,

Print services depend on four value axes: time, cost, quality, and quantity. Each value is present in every order experience, production process, and delivery. You will be successful if you align your service with customer needs, automate with these values in mind, and continually improve workflow process.

Let's look at each of the four value axes and the nine tips we have for you across them.

Let me know your thoughts about these tips and how they help you. Just reply to this message, or send me an email at: erk@rocsoft.com.

Until next time,

Elisha Kasinskas

Marketing Director

Rochester Software Associates, Inc.

Time:

Every action takes time. Time is expensive.

The right workflow in order, update, production, status, and delivery processes decreases time bottlenecks and constraints. Your customers love a simple, intuitive order and status system.

1.) Apply continuous comment and feedback systems to capture their experience.

Customers connect with people so use free, 24/7 access and personal communication when needed; it saves time. Your production team thrives when the right information is present at the ordering stage. Accurate information allows for "no questions needed" printing and finishing, and saves time.

Cost: Every action has a cost- materials, energy, people, facility, and equipment.

Continuously running equipment to feed uninterrupted orders to the staff reduces expense per piece- that can be passed back to customers.

2.) Find the key metric that satisfies customers and executives.

The executive team for a financial provider honed in on content as their key metric. They wanted the cost of an 8.5x11 full color, finished page reduced and monitored. By doing so, it required optimization of each cost component, including variable and versioned elements, and provided a fully loaded comparison against competitive pricing.

Quality: Quality is measured by customer standards - and every customer has a different definition.

One customer is determined to hit spectrophotometer on pantones. Another is okay with anything their customer will accept. Quality has to match the expectations, or you will rerun, and rerun is doubly expensive. Automate with online approvals, but:

3.) Ensure the production definition is negotiated against the printed product, not monitor variances.

4.) Verify your customer service and production monitors to spec regularly.

5) Keep previously approved printed pieces on hand for visual verification of the customer's expectation.

Quantity: Order quantities have plummeted in the last ten years.

Handling more orders with smaller quantities and high variability requires continuous improvement.

6.) The order system must be fluid, intuitive, and handle data feeds along with print files; it must almost think for the customer.

7.) An online feedback system must be as responsive to customers with one item and one order per year as it is to customers with thousands of items and hundreds of orders per month.

8.) Ensure team members have reliable methods of hand off to one another such as bar code checkpoints that work no matter what the order size or frequency.

9.) Continuously tune your workflow for regular patterns, as well as peak and slow seasons.

Where are you on your path to productivity through automation?

Visit Path to Productivity for additional tips, or contact us for specific practical actions you can take and solutions that will take you even further.