The USPS is offering significant savings opportunities in 2023 within its PostalPro service.
Across several types of mail, including retargeting, reply mail IMbA™, emerging technology, and personalized color transpromo, USPS customers can access discounts of up to 6%.
Is your business taking advantage of these savings? Doing so requires a level of operational efficiency and effective enterprise workflow management that can be challenging to achieve.
This blog post explores the challenges businesses face in their print and mail campaigns, plus how RICOH ProcessDirector™ solves these problems through powerful enterprise-grade automation.
Then, keep reading to see ProcessDirector in action and learn about the real-world results businesses are achieving in postal optimization and automation.
Understanding the Challenges
As an organization with high volume printing and mailing needs, you’re facing specific challenges—both to operational efficiency as a whole and to reducing spend through programs like USPS PostalPro.
Relying heavily on presort 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.
Second, businesses with complex production needs 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, to print in color when doing so provides no value, and so forth.
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 presort houses, many firms continue to do so because moving mailing in-house creates new concerns. Doing so requires the right technology that can eliminate bottlenecks and create automated solutions to correct them.
Protecting Your Spend and Profitability through Automation Using RICOH ProcessDirector™
If the challenges we just described sound familiar, then RICOH ProcessDirector is an ideal solution that provides powerful automation and enterprise workflow management for any business involved in print and mail.
Automation is a thread running through all of RICOH ProcessDirector. Let’s look at three specific ways that ProcessDirector enables automation that protects your spend and profitability.
Commingling and Presorting
By commingling individual mail pieces, you’ll save on postage at scale. Some ProcessDirector users save five figures or more per month just in postage!
RICOH ProcessDirector enhances your operational efficiency in several ways:
- Group individual mail pieces through input data files
- Merge and batch mailings to maximize discounts (such as those the USPS is currently running)
- Maximize paper and printer usage by batching jobs
Utilization of Digital Assets
ProcessDirector gives you the power to coordinate printed mailings with your organization’s email campaigns. Track the customer journey not just in clicks and digital interactions but also through barcodes, QR codes, and promotions in your print mailings.
Because all the data associated with customers and campaigns (digital + mail) resides in a single system of record, you can leverage that data in ways that weren’t possible before.
Maximization of Resources
When you automate significant portions of your print and mail workflows, you maximize resources in multiple ways.
- First, you reduce the opportunities for manual, human-generated errors to creep in.
- As a result, you reduce wasted resources (unusable print material) and time (spent printing that unusable material and correcting the mistakes).
- By freeing up employees from manual input and “babysitting” tasks, you create more time for those resources to focus on more profitable or higher-priority tasks and you bridge the staffing gap
- Workflows run more quickly and more efficiently when they don’t get held up at (human) bottlenecks.
Across just these three areas, RICOH ProcessDirector is already generating significant results in protecting spend and increasing profitability through automation.
ProcessDirector in Action: Transactional Print
Here’s just one of many examples of ProcessDirector in action, generating these kinds of results for enterprise businesses.
The Customer
A national mortgage provider was sending multiple documents in separate mailings. Monthly household mortgage statements and escrow statements were sent separately, generated on disparate systems that didn’t communicate with each other.
Postal charges were climbing unsustainably. The client approached us to provide a solution and craft a pilot program to validate the solution with the hopes of integrating it company-wide.
The RICOH ProcessDirector Solution
The Ricoh Advanced Solutions Practice team configured a solution for the client based around ProcessDirector™.
Under the new system, as documents are received, they are indexed to identify the account number. From there, documents are placed into a pool to be made available for batching.
RICOH ProcessDirector looks through this pool, finding all documents for a given month with the same account number, and combines them into a single piece of mail.
The Result
The mortgage provider started with a considerable pilot program of 200,000 households. The new workflow worked well and, once validated, was applied to the company’s standard workflow.
This client saw an ROI of $80k in annual postal savings alone. Not only that, they measured a dramatic increase in customer satisfaction.
Protect Spend and Profitability with ProcessDirector™
Using ProcessDirector’s capabilities for identifying, consolidating, and merging your mailings helps you maximize your resources and protect your spend. You’ll be able to access and qualify for postal discounts, driving down your spend even further.
RICOH ProcessDirector’s powerful automation capabilities lower error rates, speed up production, and enhance your profitability. By freeing your existing staff to do more and focus on higher-value activities, you’ll lessen your hiring need as well.
At Ricoh, we understand that print workflows are complex. And we’re here to help! Ricoh Professional Services staff and our valued partners are trained to identify and remove the bottlenecks in your print business.
Reduce Spend and Increase Profitability ->
Meet the Author
Brian is experienced in Production Print hardware and software sales management, Marketing Technology Workflow Consulting, employee and customer training, Print and Marketing software sales, Regulatory compliance and workflow software sales. His goal is to progress to a sales leadership position in B2B Technology organization. He specializes in B2B Technology Sales and Sales Management, CRM systems, Sales development, sales training, Marketing Resource Management, Digital color printing workflow analysis, and development.
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