Business Profile
Borns Group, Inc. is a full-service marketing, print and mailing service provider. Offering single-source convenience, Borns Group delivers expertise and resources to support any type of business communication needs.
Industry
Marketing, print & mailing service provider
Borns Group, Inc. Advances Using Solimar® Rubika®
Borns Group Videos (9 Videos)
Full video interview with Lee Borns, Borns Group and Pat McGrew, McGroup Group
Solimar Workflow
Increased Revenue
Lowered Development Costs
Labor Cost Savings
Improved Turnaround Times
Improved Customer Satisfaction
Solimar Visibility Dashboard
Pat McGrew's Industry Insights on Direct Mail
Introduction
Established in 1991 by Virgil Borns as Professional Mailing & Marketing, Borns Group, Inc. is family-owned with production facilities in Watertown and Aberdeen, South Dakota. Over the years, they have evolved from a local commercial printer to a provider of complete offline and online marketing solutions for regional and national clients.
By blending marketing, print and mailing expertise with single-source convenience, Borns Group can serve as a full-service resource for virtually all business communication needs. They step in and work with clients at any stage of a project – from creative inception, design and list acquisition through printing, fulfillment and mailing.
With thousands of jobs and millions of printed pieces under their belt, they know what works and what doesn’t. They have the proven ability to meet a wide range of demands while respecting and working within the constraints of a timeline and budget. Their satisfied customers return to them again and again because of their personal attention to the details of their projects and their willingness to tackle any type of job, regardless of size, budget or deadline.
Solimar Systems recently interviewed Lee Borns, Borns Group Vice President to discuss their decision to acquire and implement their Solimar Systems solution.
At-A-Glance
Locations
- Aberdeen, South Dakota, USA
- Watertown, South Dakota, USA
Business Solution
- PDF workflow automation
- Increased output quality & appearance
- Post-composition document enhancement
- Postal mail processing
Solimar Products
- SOLitrack™
- Rubika®
- SOLfusion™
- Solimar® Indexing Tools
Benefits
- Increased document quality by conditionally adding electronic inserts
- Seamless integration with postal software to leverage mail address cleansing and gain efficiencies
- Printer finishing information added to enable automated production printing
- Improved document quality with enhanced color images and logos
- Imposition to automatically sequence and arrange logical pages to support book or booklet production
Results of Using Solimar Solutions
$400,000
Increase in yearly incremental sales revenue
$100,000
Reduction in yearly labor & operational costs
$20,000
Savings in yearly development costs
60%
Decrease in client project turnaround time
25%
Improvement in customer satisfaction
“Bottom line, Rubika is responsible for adding nearly $400,000 per year in incremental sales revenue.”
LEE BORNS
Vice President, Borns Group, Inc.
The Challenges
Borns Group identified several internal areas where they wanted to improve their existing production printing environment:
- Slow turnaround time to onboard new jobs and complete client projects
- Difficult to scale operations and increase capacity
- Lack of automation, too many manual touchpoints in operational workflows
- High manual labor and related costs
- Too many areas and opportunities for human error
- Lack of integration with existing postal processing software
“A primary challenge for us was to produce better client jobs with a shortened turnaround window,” said Lee Borns, Vice President at Borns Group. “Getting improved quality to our clients in a faster timeframe is something they would immediately distinguish and recognize. We knew that if we could accomplish this it would help our customer satisfaction levels. We also knew that increasing customer satisfaction often leads to improved customer retention. This all leads into a situation where we wanted to increase our sales retention revenue and improve our overall P&L.”
In addition to mail processing integration, Borns Group established goals to:
- Improve their automated finishing capability for cut sheet printers
- Increase control of their inkjet presses, such as adding pages and perf marks
- Add digital inserts automatically
- Migrate black & white logos to full color
- Enable support for easy-to-use imposition for book and booklet production
The Solution
Automates output production tasks such as external processes & scripts, indexing PDF documents, and executing Rubika® configurations.
Post-composition re-engineering solution to automate manual processes, enable postal savings, add value to documents and dynamically modify print data.
Powerful PDF indexing tools that provide tools to design, test and manage indexing templates for data extraction.
The capabilities of Rubika provided Borns Group powerful and exceptional post-composition document re-engineering and enhancement capabilities. Borns Group implemented Rubika to eliminate slow manual processes, add content value to documents, increase the quality of print data for their clients and ultimately the end user document recipient.
“Rubika is an ideal product for our post-composition document enhancement workflow requirements,” said Borns. “It improves our P&L on both ends. It accomplishes many things to decrease our costs while at the same time help increase our sales revenue with higher retention and securing new business.”
Unlike other competitive software solutions which often rely on custom programming from experienced developers, Rubika requires no complicated coding. Instead, it provides an intuitive user interface to allow rapid implementation of production changes or new additions. Rubika is used broadly across many vertical industries to address workflow challenges and can be configured in several different ways to increase efficiency and value without expensive time-sensitive programming, resources and costs.
“From the beginning we could see the power and flexibility Rubika delivers to help us with our automation needs. We liked the robust functionality it brings without needing highly skilled and expensive programming staff members to make it go,” said Borns.
“We use Rubika’s Export/Import and Sort modules to enable householding. This process allows us to achieve postal savings by combining more than one piece into a single envelope. We are also able to use our postal software from BCC Software together with Rubika. The two software products work well together for us.” Borns added, “We often index PDF files to capture address block information and then use Rubika to export the address information. The BCC Software ingests the data file for NCOALink® processing and returns an updated data file back to Rubika which gets imported back into the PDF. This allows mailpieces to be sorted in a manner for increased postal discounts. It also performs address cleansing based on the NCOALink® information returned by BCC Software. The whole process operates very smoothly and accurately.”
“We have calculated that we have reduced our print production labor and business process costs by over $100,000 per year.”
LEE BORNS
Vice President, Borns Group, Inc.
The Results
The Solimar® Rubika product suite has helped Borns Group meet many of their objectives involving expense reduction and overall sales revenue growth.
“We have calculated that we have reduced our print production labor and business process costs by over $100,000 per year,” said Borns. “There are many repetitive manual operations that the Rubika software can do faster and more accurately than people. In addition, Rubika has saved us another $20,000 per year in development resource expenses by eliminating expensive coding projects.”
With the enhanced document quality and shortened project turnaround time, sales revenue has increased dramatically. Borns added, “Our average client project turnaround time has been reduced by 60%, which sometimes makes the difference in whether or not we can secure the sales contract. Customer satisfaction has increased nearly 25%.”
“Customer retention is essentially priceless. It means a lot to us to have repeat business and create long-term relationships with clients. The added document quality infusion Rubika delivered plus the customer retention factor have contributed heavily to our annual sales number,” Borns added. “Bottom line is, Rubika is responsible for adding nearly $400,000 per year in incremental sales revenue.”
“The Solimar team has been very helpful in implementing our Rubika solution with us,” Borns added. “The technical support team was also extremely helpful in enabling us to get up to speed so we were as productive as possible.”