By Juergen Krebs, Software Sales Manager, Ricoh Graphic Communications, Ricoh Europe
During 2023 USPS offered significant savings opportunities within its PostalPro service. Across several types of mail USPS customers could access discounts of up to 6%. It is something that is being repeated for 2024.
In Europe Austrian Post’s Sponsoring.Mail service supports certain clients such as charitable organisations and political parties with reduced postage, a number of incentives are run by Great Britain’s Royal Mail, and Deutsche Post’s DialogPost delivers attractive discounts.
Is your business taking advantage of these savings?
As an organisation with high volume printing and mailing needs, maximising the opportunities and cost reductions possible requires a level of operational efficiency and effective enterprise workflow management that can be challenging to achieve.
Relying heavily on pre-sort houses gets the mail to the target audience well enough, but it often negatively affects job execution delivery as well as timelines. When you relinquish ownership over portions of the mailing workflow, you relinquish a degree of control over the results.
Businesses with complex production needs also often struggle to identify and consolidate assets. At scale, it’s common to end up sending separate documents or mailings that could have been combined.
Without a cloud computing platform delivering clear insight into your enterprise print workflows, higher costs and waste are practically inevitable. Wasted paper and postage drive up costs, and delivery delays reduce timeliness and conversion rates.
Despite the challenges associated with outsourcing to pre-sort houses, many firms continue to do so because moving mailing inhouse creates new concerns. Doing so requires the right technology that can eliminate bottlenecks and create automated solutions to correct them.
Powerful automation and enterprise workflow management for any business involved in print and mail is provided by RICOH ProcessDirector. It protects your spend and profitability in the following three ways:
1 Co-mingling, pre-sorting, and batching – By co-mingling individual mail pieces, you’ll save on postage at scale. Grouping individual mail pieces through input data files by merging and batching mailings maximises discounts as can merging by recipient. This can also help optimise paper and printer use. ProcessDirector users can save five figures or more per month just in postage! There are consolidation services that also combine mail from different senders to make postage savings. ProcessDirector can help with consolidation too and eliminate the need for this external cost.
2 Utilisation of Digital Assets – ProcessDirector gives you the power to coordinate printed mailings with your organisation’s email campaigns. You can track the customer journey in clicks and digital interactions and through barcodes, QR codes, and promotions in your print mailings. Because all the data associated with customers and campaigns (digital plus mail) resides in a single system of record, it can be levered in ways that weren’t possible before.
3 Maximisation of Resources – When you automate significant portions of your print and mail workflows, you maximise resources in multiple ways. You reduce the opportunities for manual, human-generated errors to creep in. You reduce wasted resources (unusable print material) and time (spent printing that unusable material and correcting the mistakes).
You free up employees from manual input and “babysitting” tasks to focus on more profitable or higher priority tasks and bridge the staffing gap. Workflows then run more quickly and efficiently as they are not held up by (human) bottlenecks.
Across these areas RICOH ProcessDirector generates significant results in protecting spend and increasing profitability through automation.
Using ProcessDirector’s capabilities for identifying, consolidating, and merging mailings helps maximise resources and protect spend. Operations can access and qualify for postal discounts, driving down costs. RICOH ProcessDirector’s powerful automation capabilities lower error rates, speed up production, and enhance profitability. By freeing existing staff to do more and focus on higher value activities the hiring need is also lessened.
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