Is it REALLY Possible to Still Save Money in Print and Mail?

Truth be told, our industry has been talking about saving money in print and mail for as long as high volumes of communications, correspondences and direct mailings have been sent out to consumers. It begs the question…can you still save money today in print and mail or have the techniques been all used up?

Saving money on the mailing part of Customer Communication Management (CCM), direct mail and/or other marketing products is top of mind for in-plants and service providers due to the regular shift in postal rates. The good news for Print Service Providers (PSPs) and In-Plant print and mailing facilities is that technology does continue to create opportunities to save in the production process. And many organisations still have processes that have been difficult in the past to take from manual to automated. Like the adoption of smartphones and apps for daily tasks like banking and shopping, the print production floor is turning a corner where modular and provider agnostic software can not only integrate but monitor and optimise an environment. Difficult processes can be tackled with success.

Over the past 25+ years, our team at Solimar Systems has been continually developing print management, automated workflows, print and electronic communication enhancement and enrichment and postal optimisation. This is why we are bullish on the ability to reduce your organisations, and many others, costs associated with your current processes. As part of our Chemistry platform, we recently announced the latest version of our visibility and oversight solution, as well as, advanced features for automatically combining like jobs on your production floor—and yes, you can manually combine them on the fly too.

Moreover, the batching features of the modular SOLitrack component of our Chemistry platform can also monitor for due dates on workflows and jobs defined and set in the system. If you have Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that must be adhered to in order to prevent fines from your customers or regulatory agencies, the latest release of SOLitrack allows you to set up these deadlines and then automatically take action to prevent missing your SLAs. In addition, event notifications and alerts can also be defined for jobs and workflows in order to monitor the production process and keep you up-to-date in real-time.

Why is the batching feature helping production environments turn a technology and efficiency corner? As production print engines continue to run at high rates of speed, batching together jobs with similar production and mailing needs into a single job that you can submit to your print engine (inkjet, toner, cut sheet) means it can run more efficiently and at its rated speed. This reduces change over time, waste from switching jobs and clutching or processing time. It also means that the finishing and mailing preparation process will be more efficient with the ability to obtain greater postal discounts. Pair that with our ability to work with pre-sort mailing houses and you can create a powerful workflow that drives the highest level of cost savings available.

Some of the concerns we hear around being able to digitally commingle and batch work in a production environment is individual job tracking and reporting. As we developed this latest time and cost saving feature, we took that into consideration. Even after a batch is created, the ability to track and report on individual jobs within the batch is retained. The result: less manual processes, quicker completion of work and an overall reduction in costs and improvement in workflow efficiency.

We invite you to explore the latest technology that can help you shave costs off your print and mail processes while being able to better track and report on it.