Over the last five months, I answered the simple question: Is your Customer Communications workflow SIMPLE? In my experience with customers, workflows are never simple, but I believe they can be SIMPLE-fied through use of technology and strategy. That is, SIMPLE meaning: Streamline, Innovate, Measure, Profitable, Leverage and Extend. Really, it is all about how you approach your Customer Communications Management (CCM) workflow.
We discussed how to Streamline, Innovate, and Measure and how to become more Profitable and Measure, this month we will finish our 6 part series with extending your investment you already have with your current CCM workflow.
If you missed the first five parts of the series, please take a look at the January through May issues in the content library:
Extend:
1. Useful Life of hardware: From an extension point of view, many of the methods we have covered in this series serve to extend process, software and hardware. However, from a hardware perspective, solutions can be used to extend the life of hardware you may only be using for one job a year or a couple times a quarter. For example, consider a situation where your operations keeps a printer or inserter device because it is the only one a specific and large job will run on every year when it comes into the workflow. Situations like this where you have hardware that is down due to a mismatch of technology is an opportunity to extend the life of that hardware by using workflow tools to match the technology input/output needs and get an asset back up and running.
2. Composition software and applications: Looking at our tips above for how to leverage print stream data it is worth pointing out that you can extend the life of your current and working composition software and applications. For many companies the prospect of changing their composition processes would open the door to missing SLAs and costly re-programming. By using processes that leave your working processes in place and by adding value after the composition step, you can extend the life of these systems while still making your CCM goals a reality.
3. Time of your FTEs: One of the greatest achievements in adding value to the CCM workflow is being able to take the Full Time Equivalents (FTE) you have on your team and place them on high-priority projects that have the goal of changing the business in positive ways. By moving people from manual processes and implementing time saving ways of achieving information and analytic gains, your team members can be spending their valuable time working on improvements and projects that will provide additional value to the organization. And you will also achieve better return not only on the investment in your people, but in the hardware and software running in your CCM workflow.
The above examples are just a few of the ways you can make your customer communications more SIMPLE. I hope you have found this six part series both educational and informative. Like any change, planning is the key step for success. If you would like to talk with me one on one, please be sure to reach out to me and we can discuss your situation and how you can SIMPLE-fy your communications.
About David Day, EDP
David Day, EDP brings over 32 years of experience in the document management & mail industry. As an active member of Xplor for over 17 years, David frequently presents at local and global Xplor meetings. He has also been a guest speaker at various company user and industry groups including National Postal Forum, Graph Expo and Mailcom. David, Product Marketing Manager at CrawfordTech, is responsible for worldwide for their Enterprise Output Management Products. He works with customers, prospects, sales and product development to identify customer requirements, evaluate solutions and make product recommendations
We discussed how to Streamline, Innovate, and Measure and how to become more Profitable and Measure, this month we will finish our 6 part series with extending your investment you already have with your current CCM workflow.
If you missed the first five parts of the series, please take a look at the January through May issues in the content library:
Extend:
1. Useful Life of hardware: From an extension point of view, many of the methods we have covered in this series serve to extend process, software and hardware. However, from a hardware perspective, solutions can be used to extend the life of hardware you may only be using for one job a year or a couple times a quarter. For example, consider a situation where your operations keeps a printer or inserter device because it is the only one a specific and large job will run on every year when it comes into the workflow. Situations like this where you have hardware that is down due to a mismatch of technology is an opportunity to extend the life of that hardware by using workflow tools to match the technology input/output needs and get an asset back up and running.
2. Composition software and applications: Looking at our tips above for how to leverage print stream data it is worth pointing out that you can extend the life of your current and working composition software and applications. For many companies the prospect of changing their composition processes would open the door to missing SLAs and costly re-programming. By using processes that leave your working processes in place and by adding value after the composition step, you can extend the life of these systems while still making your CCM goals a reality.
3. Time of your FTEs: One of the greatest achievements in adding value to the CCM workflow is being able to take the Full Time Equivalents (FTE) you have on your team and place them on high-priority projects that have the goal of changing the business in positive ways. By moving people from manual processes and implementing time saving ways of achieving information and analytic gains, your team members can be spending their valuable time working on improvements and projects that will provide additional value to the organization. And you will also achieve better return not only on the investment in your people, but in the hardware and software running in your CCM workflow.
The above examples are just a few of the ways you can make your customer communications more SIMPLE. I hope you have found this six part series both educational and informative. Like any change, planning is the key step for success. If you would like to talk with me one on one, please be sure to reach out to me and we can discuss your situation and how you can SIMPLE-fy your communications.
About David Day, EDP
David Day, EDP brings over 32 years of experience in the document management & mail industry. As an active member of Xplor for over 17 years, David frequently presents at local and global Xplor meetings. He has also been a guest speaker at various company user and industry groups including National Postal Forum, Graph Expo and Mailcom. David, Product Marketing Manager at CrawfordTech, is responsible for worldwide for their Enterprise Output Management Products. He works with customers, prospects, sales and product development to identify customer requirements, evaluate solutions and make product recommendations
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