It’s been said that when the only tool you have is a hammer every problem begins to look like a nail.

This idea applies to the print industry, specifically with regard to transpromo. With printers looking for better ways to add value to the print/mail channel in an effort to compete with fast-emerging online channels, it has emphasized what it considers to be its best tools: Variable data and color. These are the hammers of the print industry and everywhere you look, the pundits are looking to nail down transpromo using traditional means.

But the industry has evolved and now offers other tools, doesn’t it? As a collective group we needs to get this message out to the business community, in particular C-level executives but also the business IT community (as opposed to the print IT community).

With that in mind, I’ve been talking to Michael Lambert, VP of Sales, at Sefas Innovation. There may be no human resource in the print/mail industry that combines creativity and pragmatic operational effectiveness like Mike Lambert. If you want some new perspective, he’s a great person to turn to. I often get four or five great ideas from Mike in just a few short moments of Interaction.

So if you’re going to Print 09, make plans to visit Mike Lambert in Booth 7137. I guarantee that it will be time well spent. Just tell him I sent you.

• If you’re a business owner or C-level executive, you’ll want to talk to Mike to get a better understanding of the Operational Viewpoint and how it relates to your business and service models which you may not be getting from your own staff. Mike has a unique perspective on this viewpoint having spent many years in the operational trenches and has experience making long term business decisions in this area. He’s a man of great vision and can help you better understand how to leverage your own operation and become a more strategic partner and offer increased business value.

• If you’re a print to mail operations professional, talk to Mike about how to make your operations more business focused and strategically valuable to the organization. He understands the day to day pressures to deliver high quality, timely services and clearly understands the complexity of producing high volume output. Mike has a unique ability to quickly assess and relate common issues or “opportunities” to industry best practices and approaches. Just be prepared to hear some things that may at first be unsettling.

Making Print/Mail Operations Strategic

For example, Mike believes that most print/mail operations need to re-position their place within the organization and proactively help set clear business objectives that include their distribution channel. Too often print/mail managers operate in a vacuum and reactively play the hand that is dealt to them.

“If you aren’t fully aware of your company’s business priorities and objectives you can’t really add much value to evolving your business,” he often tells clients. “Operations people are always at risk of being in a bubble. They know that they have 700 jobs to print by morning and a million mail pieces to deliver by a certain time of day. They are the experts at knowing HOW to do what they need to do. What remains a mystery is the reason WHY they do it.  Operations rarely have the time or resources to assess their own performance and or implement process improvement opportunities and even more seldom determine whether or not they should be doing the process at all.”

This is Lambert’s mantra, regarding high volume print production: “Fix it, optimize it and eliminate it.”

In other words, the goal of every print/mail operation manager should be to openly question whether or not you are delivering value and how well you’re helping the overall organization achieve its business goals. You should always strive to reach a place where the actual print/mail production operation could someday be eliminated. It’s when you start to think in business objectives more over operational objectives can you truly see the difference in priorities and provide strategic value.

For those that don’t know him, Mike Lambert started his career right out of high school as a temporary printer operator for Cigna. Over time he began using his creativity and technical skills to better align the operations to add more business value. His last position at Cigna was an Enterprise Technology Architect and his last project was the design of a enterprise content management infrastructure that would help consolidated all Cigna-related customer communications and claim data into a centralized online presentment environment. He left Cigna with a state-of-the-art Automated Document Factory that relied on his own homegrown, patented ADF-enabling software.

“A large influence on our infrastructure planning was based on optimizing customer service. We came to terms with the understanding that the real business we were in was the customer retention business. Everything we did was geared toward creating happier customers. So we asked, ‘What customer communication services would we need to provide to enable us to retain customers?’

“A second objective involved looking inward to optimizing the physical production and delivery process to maintain and reduce costs. Part of the planning here naturally involved the consideration of outsourcing some or all of the physical printing and mailing operation.”

Fix it, optimize it and eliminate it. 

“You should always be prepared to outsource your operation,” he says. “If it’s done correctly, outsourcing can be beneficial. It gives you the ability to have a variable cost model and provides the opportunity to focus your investments on delivering the most business value, while siphoning off the commoditized, portions of the operation to cheaper service providers. Keep only what adds value and lose the rest.”

“Package up the value—digital presorting, automation barcodes, personalized messages, print suppression and electronic presentment. Operation managers need to focus on leveraging their digital assets before they become physical assets. Even if you never outsource you should architecture your environment as if you were going to. By thinking this way you’re able to modularize the operational components and extract the cost savings and value add services upstream and enable organizations to outsource without missing a beat or taking a beating on price.”

“Here’s a simple question I ask print operations managers: if you could save 20 percent of the print cost or 20 percent of the mailing cost, which would you prefer? And of course when they stop and think about it, they answer the mail, because they know postage is the biggest cost they have. But prior to asking, they weren’t thinking holistically about the end to end process and saw themselves as the print guy, not a strategic partner in the business workflow.”

Create Happier Customers

Fix it, optimize it and eliminate it. 

Where does transpromo fit in that equation?

“I spend most of my time fixing things,” Lambert says. “Sefas has a great set of tools that fix broken applications and assets. Most of our business is centered on this. But when we’re done fixing it and the operation is running smoothly, then it’s time to talk about optimizing it. We do this as well or better than any of our competitors.”

“And that’s when the topic of how to leverage what they just got to fix things to help offer new service capabilities.  This is typically when we start to discuss capabilities to add transpromo messages for example. The concept of transpromo is about enhancing the digital asset by adding content to the communication on the fly with the purpose of cross-sell and/or up-selling a particular customer, right? That’s the standard print to mail model of transpromo.

“But if our goal is to create happier customers, is this actually attainable through this approach?  Look honey, I just got solicited by our insurance carrier on my statement, aren’t they the best….”

To that end, Lambert believes in using variable messaging on the billing statement to proactively educate consumers by answering FAQs with the intent of reducing call center volume. “One of the biggest costs for most organizations is managing their call center. The biggest bang for your buck with regard to inserting content into a customer communication is reducing the call centers operating costs. This is a safer bet moreover the risk of sending a marketing messages which may or may not result in revenue.  If you can reduce your inbound call volume by one percent you’d be saving the company real money while improving customer satisfaction. How often do you get the chance to leverage technology that you implemented to fix an operational problem to become a better strategic business partner, reduce frontend business costs and increase customer satisfaction and retention, my guess is in our business not too often.”

Too many operations managers evaluate their own performance based on the tactical steps required to produce output as opposed to how they truly impact their companies strategic imperatives. There are numerous tools in the marketplace—and, yes, Sefas offers some really good ones—that allow operations to add a whole range of new capabilities and provide for an intelligent approach to print to mail that moves the focus further upstream and helps position them to be more tightly integrated with the front end business objectives.

If operations become more proactive and think with an enterprise focus, perhaps the other organizational silos will agree to meet halfway. So marketing departments may not throw their projects over the wall, but may become more involved and aware of the downstream processes. Business IT could then consider different alternatives to channeling messages to help customer service. And, suddenly, surprisingly, as each of the separate goals becomes a shared vision, the organization is acting in unity.

Eliminate it

If you’ve fixed your problems and optimized the production what’s next?  You need to consider the bigger picture: what is the value of optimizing an in house print shop in a company that doesn’t sell print as a business, what would the impact be if you outsourced today and how successful can we be in print suppression and online presentment?

“Most organizations deal with hundreds if not thousands of applications. It’s nearly impossible to think about implementing enterprise changes through traditional methods of modifying each application.  By using a utility model to apply global changes like adding a barcode, changing a logo can be done in a fraction of the time and cost.  Other initiative such as driving online presentment to save money on mail costs is not commonly at the forefront of most print operations objectives.  But the fact remains this is the most cost effective alternative for customer communications and organizations that don’t have an electronic presentment strategy will soon see their revenues go to their ecommerce group.”

Lambert also believes that electronic presentment is the perfect proving ground for transpromo. “With direct mail you test, test and then test again. With online presentment you can drastically reduce the cost and time by tweaking your digital assets at will.  This approach will allow you to quickly discover what colors work best, experiment with placement of offers on the page, measure responses rates to personal urls or landing pages.  It’s a great proving ground for transpromo without committing the resources or cost to print it.”

Most important is the business linkage. A customer service call or visit to your self service website should always be able to generate an online version of the bill which should include attractive transpromo or trans-educational messaging that may or may not be on the physical version. By adding more value to the electronic version, you’ll help drive up adoption rates for e-presentment and suppress more print.

Fix it, optimize it and then eliminate it. That’s a full toolkit.

Sefas will launch Back Office at Print 09, which makes booth 7137 a must visit for every attendee.