Saving Money and Building Efficiency with Managed Print Services

Getting real benefits in the real world

By Kevin Craine

Workgroup printers and copiers are an environment that is ripe for greater efficiency and cost savings. Pick any department or any business process and you can bet that printers and copiers are essential tools to get the job done. But despite their importance to company performance, printers and copiers are rarely managed as a corporate asset. Often budgeting and planning is decentralized across various departments. This inevitably results in increased operating costs and lost opportunity for process improvement.

What is Managed Print Services?

Organizations of all sizes and types are starting to realize the bottom line benefit to getting their output under control. They are doing this through Managed Print Services (MPS) – a strategy designed to analyze and manage document output devices throughout the organization and minimize the costs associated with workgroup printing and copying. The long-term results of a successful MPS strategy includes enhanced productivity, increased savings and improved environmental sustainability, to name a few.

Last time around we looked at the steps that lead to setting a strategy. They aren't difficult and mostly involve evaluating where you are before you set off developing a strategy. For many companies the evaluation process is eye-opening. Who knew there were so many customer touch points? Who knew we were giving so many mixed messages to the customers? The result should have been a better understanding of the current state of the customer communication environment and a sense of where improvements are appropriate.

At this point there are two things that should happen in a coordinated way: the development of tactics to get you through the near term and a strategy to act as guidance for the long term. It is essential to have both, but they are not the same!

A strategy is a long term plan that should be designed to identify the opportunities to advance the product and brand using components from the existing product tool box and new tools (information, processes, people) acquired based on market conditions and revenue goals. That's a mouthful, but anyone who has read Sun Tzu and the Art of War will recognize the elements. In the customer communication environment the customer communication strategy should speak to the required outcomes of all customer communication activities, including benchmarking and performance monitoring.

Your strategy should start with the mission statement that will guide you. Remember, this is with respect to customer communication activities, so what is the role of customer communication with respect to your brand, your products and your customers? Can you articulate it?  If you cannot, it will be hard to set a strategy!

Once you agree on the mission, and assuming you know what tools you have to work with based on your ground work, what is the framework for communications activities. Not just the big picture, but how the elements are intended to work together. Think of this as the "who, what, where, when and how" (4w1h) of growing the relationship with the customer.

So, who are you trying to capture and retain as a customer?

What do you have to sell to them and what is your value proposition to them?

Where will you engage with the customer? Online? Broadcast media? Direct Mail? On bills, statements, packing slips and other transaction communication?

When will you engage? How often will you have something new to say?

How will you measure your performance? What is the baseline and how will you know if you are growing or shrinking?

From these basics you should be able to define your strategy for the next two to four years. Your strategy should be written, circulated, agreed to and made available for all team members. You should be testing against that strategy on a regular basis to see if you are following the strategy or if you are wandering off the path.

The strategy should be short and to the point, avoiding the tendency to create a long document that no one will ever read.

Next time we'll talk about tactics... they are actually more fun!

Demystifying Document Strategy Design

Documents, Technology and People

By Kevin Craine

Most organizations do not consider themselves to be in the document business.  Nevertheless, documents are really a second venture for nearly all organizations.  Whether printed on paper or viewed with a PC, documents are the chief mechanism that prompts people to act.  Documents provide the impetus for customers to buy, borrow and pay, and are the foundation of business revenue.  Documents are the tools that help run a business every day and are the means by which business processes begin and end.

Organizations that have a document strategy will be more likely to have an advantage.  But designing a document strategy is not easy without a clear road map to guide strategic design efforts. For many, the lament becomes, “I know a document strategy is important, but how do I develop one?”   My book, “Designing a Document Strategy,” (www.Document-Strategy.com) describes a five-phase process to design a document strategy tailored to your specific situation.

Documents, Technology and People

One way to demystify the design of a document strategy is to focus your efforts on three specific areas of inquiry: Documents, Technology and People.   These three elements are essentially the “what, how and who” of your document strategy: what documents are important, how they are produced and who cares about how they perform in the process.