Danger Will Robinson: Ignoring Your Print and Digital Communications Onboarding Workflow?

It is a little bit ironic (don’t you think)…that it is difficult to stand back from our daily processes to see where a little bit of improvement or ingenuity would help us do more (with less) and support more business flowing through our organization. We have heard of clients likening this to a whirlwind…there are always things that need to be done daily that seem to prevent us from stepping back and working on those strategic projects. This can be especially true at the start of any workflow process; a situation where you need to just get whatever it is started so you can get the work rolling through your environment.

In print and digital communications, whether you are printing regulated communications at a high volume, a mix of marketing materials and transactional or something a little different like direct mail and graphics arts print, the workflow you define for the setup and production of your jobs is the lifeblood of your organization. A part of that process we see clients have trouble with, especially in-plants and service bureaus, is the onboarding of new customers or new jobs/projects.

In fact, according to our Keynote at the 2018 Solimar User Conference, Pat McGrew, Keypoint Intelligence, one of the top five bottlenecks print and digital providers are experiencing is job onboarding. To test this with our user base, we ran a live poll during Pat’s session and the results showed that onboarding was indeed in the top five, but was actually more influential to that audience coming in as one of the top two reasons they felt they had bottlenecks in their organization.

And this is the whirlwind. We know we have these challenges in the defined steps we follow to get work into and out-of our production environments—our workflow—however, many find it difficult to rally change with the fast pace of business. That is truly where we hope you will allow our team at Solimar to help. The results might surprise you.

MassPrinting, based in Massachusetts, offers Document Output Solutions including print management. As part of their customer base, they serve a large number of insurance carriers for their printed communications management, production, and delivery. Taking in jobs from a wide variety of clients, they realized that they were spending a lot of time onboarding new work and having trouble pushing it through their workflow in an efficient manner. In reviewing their processes, they made a decision to take control of what was coming in from their clients, but they needed help from an organization with solutions to make this possible. For these solutions, they turned to Solimar Systems and our Chemistry™ Platform to help them define and implement.

In fact, we recently released a new video with Barry Crawford, Chief Technology Officer at MassPrinting, on the benefits they have seen from their Solimar Rubika and SOLfusion solution (watch here). In the video, Barry talks about how they had a lot of challenges around the jobs they were getting from their customers and how they kept trying to force their systems to compose the print files to fit boxes they just weren’t designed to produce.

For MassPrinting, and Barry’s team, the answer was taking control using Solimar’s document re-engineering solution, Rubika, to be able to manipulate the files in order to push them through their workflow in the fastest and highest quality manner possible. Additionally, it provided the ability to hand-off the files to the printing environments without complications or added time. Another time saver was realized with SOLfusion by automating processes throughout the workflow whether they were Solimar tasks or tasks driven by other solutions.

Barry told us onboarding is a critical part of providing a superior customer experience and quality service. The impact of improving their onboarding has resulted in being able to add a significant number of insurance carrier customers, as well as, referrals from their current customers to other carriers looking for a better level-of-service from their providers.

We invite you to watch the full video case study with MassPrinting and Barry Crawford to discover how they leverage Solimar technology to their benefit and how you could do the same in your organization. You may also contact our expert team and start exploring how our solutions could drive improved efficiency and an increase in business.