Oct 23, 2007
Don’t Forget Your Mantra
I talk to a lot of mailers as I travel around the country, following up on leads we got from Graph Expo or from people who’ve hit our website to look at our online demo and I always ask the same question: what is the number one way that you can increase productivity?
The answer is always a variation on this theme: reduce operator touches, keep the ten digits away from the process, automate as much of the workflow as possible.
At one mailer I counted sixteen separate steps to create a finished direct mail piece from inception to post. The average number of steps is about seven or eight.
One mail operations executive I spoke with said that his goals were to a) reduce complexity, b) simplify the process and, c) make content the only variable. Now I’d suggest that the first two of these are the same thing. But he was talking about different steps in the process: reducing complexity related to the creation of the content, to the pre-press work, to the workflow. Simplifying the process was also about the workflow but it was more tactical and related to the role of the various operators and how much they needed to be involved. Make content the only variable relates to the bells and whistles and fiery hoops and high wire acts and trapeze stunts that mail operations crews perform to get people to look at their particular mail piece.
These three goals had a kind of cool rhythm to them and it reminded me of a mantra, the words or sounds that adherents to the Vedic religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism) utter when meditating. Try it: reduce complexity, simplify the process, make content the only variable. Reduce complexity, simplify the process, make content the only variable.
Which reminded me of a throwaway line in the Woody Allen movie, Annie Hall. In a Beverly Hills mansion a man on a telephone confesses, “I forgot my mantra.” (the man was played by a young Jeff Goldblum). To forget one’s mantra is to be empty-headed in the extreme.
I propose that high volume mailers try out “Remove Complexity, Simplify the Process, Make Content the Only Variable” as a mantra and never forget it. Anyone who repeats this mantra religiously will experience unprecedented gains in productivity, increased revenue, reduced wastage and will ultimately reach business nirvana: they will increase the value of their operation.
Remove Complexity
With regard to reducing complexity, one can assume at this point that we are all conscious of data erosion and have taken the steps needed to reduce Undeliverable as Addressed errors. Postage discounting, pre-sorting and other disciplines further increase deliverability and reduce postage costs.
It is also becoming more common for mailers to move from cut sheets to continuous roll-to-roll to gain efficiencies and reduce changeovers. These are steps that remove complexity. Printing inserts and envelope information inline on the roll and dynamically creating the envelope and it’s contents in a single pass is a natural next step. Eliminating pre-made envelopes removes complexity.
Any mail operation professional will tell you that the inserting process is the most error-prone part of the high volume mail business. The vendors of these systems have made great strides in reducing errors and increasing process integrity. But spoilage still occurs, which compromises the privacy of customers whose pieces must be re-printed. And with HIPAA and GLB and other regulations, subjecting an impaired document to human review can lead to serious consequences. Eliminating pre-made envelopes and inserts reduces complexity.
I asked the respected industry advisory group Madison Advisors to look into their Best Practices Analysis (BPA) database, which contains cost information from more than 80 print facilities, for evidence that eliminating pre-made inserts and envelopes inserts could reduce costs and complexity. Madison identified four standard handling functions related to inserting and examined how these components influence the total cost of a mailing. The four functions were Acquisition, Holding, Usage and Obsolescence. The results were remarkable.
“The aggregate hidden costs of printing, managing, storing and staging of traditional paper inserts and envelopes are significant,” said Kemal Carr, President of Madison Advisors. “The industry spends nearly a billion dollars a year on this process, a cost that could almost be eliminated by the Mailliner 100. Add in the additional production cost savings and the potential is huge.”
The Madison Advisor report, Competitive Intelligence: Industry Costs for Traditional Inserting focuses on cost savings achieved by eliminating the need for pre-manufactured, pre-ordered, stored and staged envelope stock. The focus of the report are the costs of storage, handling and obsolescence, which add up to about $ 0.0082 per piece. It does not include the cost of the envelope itself, which can vary from depending on purchasing power and volume. It can be found at www.megaspirea.com
Simplify the Process
The BPA developed by Madison Advisors focuses on major categories like Cost, Technology, Operational Efficiency, Strategic Vision and Organization. It’s a very useful tool that looks at some 650 data points to determine the adherence of an operation to an industry standard of excellence. Within Operational Efficiency there are numerous sub-categories, including documentation, standards, workflow, quality metrics and technology utilization. To those I might add one more category: technology-enabled simplification of processes. How well have you used the available technology to reduce your process to the most basic steps possible?
“Simplify the process” means that you have figured out how to reduce the various degrees of difficulty inherent in complex processes. It’s much more than technology. The managerial will must be there to reduce factors like human error to the greatest possible extent; document and, if possible, reduce the number of process steps; decrease the number of variables, which might include inventory, material handling, the number of set ups and even the number of runs needed to complete a day’s work.
Job set-up errors are the stuff of legend: the wrong envelopes or wrong inserts are forklifted down to the floor; the wrong data shows up in the print queue; the paper is wrong for a particular job. One can’t work with inserts and envelopes without making them a factor of the job set-up unless you use technology to create them dynamically and eliminating some very common errors. This technology further enables a very attractive, simple and reliable way to provide a holistic approach to 1:1 mail-based marketing. White space on the envelope used more effectively, with a call out on the envelope referencing an insert within to give the message greater impact.
“With the inevitable migration to digital color for transaction documents, the ability to print and personalize the outbound envelope on those same devices will provide market differentiation,” said Kemal Carr. “The Mailliner 100 enables that process, and provides the capability to support multiple application types, making it a flexible solution.”
Make Content the Only Variable
Consider the traditional envelope: it’s an expanse of mostly white space that basically hides the messages inside. What if we were able to use that white space as a part of that messagae platform? The envelope of a transactional piece of mail is almost certain to hold the attention of a recipient for the better part of a minute. It’s a very effective marketing space.
And while this is great news for mail operations people it has also, in a sense, created some problems for mail operations people. Because marketing people take pride in their creativity and often want to forget about rules and play, play, play. They want to play with the white space on the statement, which is called “transpromo”: “two inches from the name and address is the best place to put an offer” and they play with color, “a splash of red on that bill will really grab some attention” and they play with paper: “thicker stock and an off-white hue for a gold customer” and they play with inserts: “we can sell that space for three cents an envelope.”
They’ve got CRM tools and Business Intelligence and Enterprise Content Management and by this time probably a half-dozen other three letter acronyms that they want to play with. They play with your set up time and they play with complexity and they play with your mind.
And you should just say no. Because mail operations are complex enough with the postal requirements and material handling and the effect of moisture on paper and the specialized equipment and software and that inevitable disconnect between IT and operations. Remove as much complexity as you can. Use templates to determine what white space is available to play with. Use business rules to determine how and when and where a targeted market offer fits onto a page. Let content design, rather than form design, get you results.
Consider the Sonnet. The sonnet is a fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter with a carefully patterned rhyme scheme. The Elizabethan sonnet consists of three quatrains and a couplet--that is, it rhymes abab cdcd efef gg. It’s an incredibly rigid format yet some of the greatest, most creative poetry ever written has conformed to the shape of the sonnet.
Let the mail piece be your sonnet. Set unbreakable rules and give them to your marketing people and let the creativity begin. Let content be the only variable. Templates yield productivity benefits. By limiting or eliminating variations in stock, in size and in available real estate, your operation will gain in value. Make content the only variable. Your organization will be better off.
A mail operations manager once told me that data is easy; mail is hard. But remembering your mantra can help: “remove complexity, simplify the process, make content the only variable.”