Aug 21, 2007
Superior Service Support
Mastery of the ‘Double Rs’ -- Reliability and Responsiveness --
is essential to the success of any customer messaging operation.
By George Linkletter
Canon and IKON are hardly common names in the HVTO industry. But the two firms are steadily gaining expertise in the data center and are quietly achieving some uncommon results. One such example comes from the remarkable efficiencies and cost savings they achieved for the high-volume customer messaging operation at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida (BCBSF).
Based in Jacksonville, Fla., BCBSF provides access to affordable health care for more than four million Floridians. But affordability is the key concept in health care insurance today. And like all insurers, the firm must constantly review and streamline its work processes -- so it can bolster services while minimizing costs -- if it is to continuing growing.
At BCBSF, one challenge centered on the need to automate a mail fulfillment process that had had grown rapidly, was traditionally handled manually, and had become tedious, costly and prone to error.
Like all health care insurers, BCBSF conducts open enrollment for employer group clients each year. BCBSF sends detailed and highly personalized information to group members who can select customized coverage during the annual open enrollment period.
Previously, BCBSF administered the application as a pre-printed and manual operation. The firm received an array of pre-printed materials, such as booklets with different lists of providers, and various endorsements the members selected, and utilized a brigade of about 50 workers to assemble the customized packages by hand. To assure quality, the workers relied on ‘pick’ lists as they selected various documents and booklets by hand, assembled the collection into a large envelope, and affixed a mailing label.
In-line Printing
“The goal was to print all the information in-line and automate the entire process,” says Gene Rauch, print/mail operations director for BCBSF. “Instead of printing only a couple of pages for each mail piece, and then combining those by hand with the pre-printed booklets and other materials, we wanted to print each member’s entire enrollment package including ID cards in-line.”
The new approach meant the unit’s in-line print requirements would increase substantially because each individual mail piece would now consist of 80 to 100 pages printed in real-time. And the print requirements for BCBSF were already substantial. The insurer typically processes about 8.3 million mail pieces per month, which involves printing 15 million feet of paper in two-up fashion (or 30 million pages) on continuous feed equipment, and another six million images per month on cut sheet equipment.
There is also wide variety within the print requirement. The unit handles claims processing for members as well as doctors, hospitals and clinics, and processes Medicare claims under contract with the Federal government. That means it handles mail pieces that range from just one or two pages each to packages for providers that contain several hundred pages.
Not only did BCBSF need to bolster its print capabilities to accomplish the switch of the enrollment packages from manual assembly to in-line printing, it also wanted the new equipment to be flexible so it could help out with the existing or even future print requirements that might arise. And it needed to implement the solution within two weeks to meet an impending deadline.
Greater Flexibility
Rauch’s team selected three IKON-branded laser printers from Canon because the devices provided the range of benefits BCBSF needed while IKON’s on-site service assured a fast set-up and peak performance during the six-week period when the equipment would be operating 24/7.
Of course, outstanding print image quality was essential. But the ImageRUNNER 150 devices were also selected for their ancillary benefits of load balancing, automated reprinting, and easy application testing.
Load balancing was critical to the unit’s effort to boost productivity. “We didn’t want to gamble and rely on just one big printer,” explains Rauch. “We wanted three medium speed printers so we could disperse the work. If one device was down for service, we wanted to be able to shift any and all work to the other two.”
A foolproof automated reprint capability was another priority. “Damaged documents are an unfortunate reality of life in the mail finishing world. So we wanted the capability to reprint documents in real-time and without any user involvement to minimize the disruptions and assure mail piece integrity.”
The ability of the devices to easily prototype new mailing applications was a further boost to the unit’s efficiency. Just as important was the ability to accommodate a 2-D barcode, which yielded page-level integrity for each mail piece, a feature that could never be achieved via a manual process alone.
These productivity and quality benefits are extremely worthwhile. But there are impressive cost savings, too. Rauch believes the cost to print and manually assemble the open enrollment packages using the old process was about $6.00 per mail piece including postage. The new in-line printing solution from IKON and Canon has reduced the cost to about $4.00 a piece.
The pay back from the investment in the new in-line printing capability from Canon -- due to lower handling costs, faster production, fewer errors and just generally better quality -- took only about six months, according to Rauch.
Still, none of these benefits might have occurred if IKON had not been able to convince Rauch that the firm’s service support was responsive and would assure the reliability of the equipment.
“Some print/mail finishing shops, particularly those with lower volumes, are satisfied with 2-hour or even 4-hour response times,” explained Rauch. “We needed immediate and continuing coverage 24/7 to assure we could process our critical volumes. Some vendors balk at that type of requirement. IKON took it stride and figured out how to get it done -- and in only two weeks.” Rauch also points out that those three ImageRUNNERS have since grown to eight devices and are now an integral part of the unit’s data center print output capability.