As a complement to our state of the industry feature on workflow solutions, we’ve asked our panel of dealers to provide examples of actual implementation opportunities they were able to capitalize on. These real-world solutions speak to the dealer’s ability to leverage ingenuity, opportunity and a strong software package to solve a client’s challenges and create opportunities for future software and hardware play within that satisfied customer.
Head of the Class
Advanced Imaging Solutions of Minnetonka, Minnesota, has carved a solid niche for itself in serving a healthy portfolio of large school districts with software solutions and production printing centers. So when a local district put out an RFP to lease about 40 MFPs, Stephanie Keating Phillips, director of solutions of AIS, and her team scheduled a visit to meet with the district’s business and IT managers.
Phillips was duly impressed with the school district’s MFP arsenal, and she had some ideas on how to use software to enable the district to achieve better management of their printing from a cost and productivity standpoint. And perhaps the district did not need quite as many MFPs on campus, and would benefit from the addition of production printing units. The idea she proposed was for users to route higher-volume jobs that were being done at printers to production machines with multiple finishing options. Essentially, the school would have its own in-plant, of sorts. The client was intrigued, and wanted to know more.
That’s when AIS pounced. The team explained that it could use PaperCut software for authentication and usage rules. Users would “badge in” at a device, which would have the usage parameters for the individual. And for any job over a certain volume threshold, such as 500, it would automatically be pushed to a production unit.
“The task was getting people into the mindset of doing that and trusting that their jobs are going to be returned properly and on time,” Phillips said. “There are no lines of teachers waiting to use a machine.”
The second step involved designing the production room and helping the district organize staff to run the operation. AIS installed two black units with finishing capabilities such as booklet making and perfect binding, along with one color production machine. In the process, AIS was able to downsize the copier fleet by almost 80 percent.
The next step involved showing users how to leverage WebCRD web-to-print software from RSA to facilitate job ordering. It’s as easy as ordering from Amazon, according to Phillips. Users submit their files from any number of formats (PDFs, jpegs, tiffs) that are routed to the production center. A job ticket is created, the production staff chooses the machines and other parameters, and the users are notified when the jobs will be completed.
“The client was thrilled,” Phillips noted. “We’ve done it for other school districts where they started with nothing, and built these different infrastructures for them.”
The Good Hands Dealer
One key to any software solution is its ability to tie in information into a uniform fashion that can be rendered by the user. Nashville-based Novatech worked with a company that processes insurance claims. The client receives content from various dealers and vendors that have various document structures. The forms generally contained static content, but the documents were always designed differently.
“We built a process that allowed the customers to automatically have the document identified at the point of capture, whether it was a scanned, emailed or electronic submission,” said John Sutton, national director of sales for Novatech. “Then, based upon the identification of that document, it would kick off a workflow process that would route it to the appropriate person for handling.
“The system would notify the appropriate person through a PC, tablet or mobile device. That person would immediately be presented with the content, and they would have some sort of decision-making process, such as approval or rejection. Once the choice is made, the content would be routed to the next person within that cycle. That leads the workflow to a tangible result.”
The workflow overhaul updated a process that was heavily manual, according to Sutton. The new, heavily-automated process includes more specific procedural outcome for the client. As a result, the customer gets more throughput with less effort and fewer people, at a much lower cost. This produced a tangible ROI for Novatech’s client in a condensed timeframe.
Healthier Outcomes
Health care institutions, long known for producing a ponderous paper trail, have greatly benefited from automated workflow solutions. Function4 of Houston recently provided process relief to a large diagnosis center that, like many of its contemporaries, suffered from the scourge of siloed information. The goal was to unite the disparate information buckets—insurance, billing, accounting and health care records—into a single system for easy access and processing.
“We started with creating electronic forms for staff to register the patients on iPads,” explained Brad Yocum, market director. “That information is then integrated with their EMR and accounting systems. All of the information related to the patient, from a billing, insurance and accounting perspective, is also accompanied by their EMR. So when the center is looking for information on a particular patient, they have all of it residing in a central location.”
As a result, the center was able to eliminate all paper forms and hand-written documents that formerly required being entered into the accounting system. As the center handles hundreds of patients per day, the new system eliminated a tremendous amount of clerical input. Function4 is currently working with the client on a number of other different integrations.
Yocum said the integration process took upwards of 45 days for completion. Much of the time was spent coordinating resources on both Function4’s and the client’s end. It entailed collecting input from a number of the aforementioned departments, conferring and training—all done while the center’s employees had to focus on day-to-day tasks.
The Giving Spirit
Knowing your customers is perhaps equally important as knowing your own dealership’s capabilities. Take charities for example. Their expertise lie in raising funds, accepting donations and converting resources for those in needs. Using databases, digital workflows and software to automate processes…perhaps not so much.
FlexPrint, the base operations of a 12-dealer organization under the Flex Technology Group (FTG) umbrella, was recently tasked to provide a workflow automation solution for a large charity, with the epicenter of the client’s needs residing in the accounting department. According to Steve Behm, the company’s new vice president of professional services, the client wanted to capture all of the invoicing, shipping and other related documents while reducing or eliminating the paper-intensive process it had relied upon for many years. They wanted to automate their processes and save money.
FTG was able to deliver the process via DocuWare (Behm, incidentally, was vice president of sales for DocuWare prior to joining FGT). Doing more with less is obviously critical for a not-for-profit organization such as the client.
“In their world as they keep continuing to grow, the less people that they had to bring on, the better they can serve their customers and their needs,” Behm said. “That was really the cost side of it: how do we not bring on more people? That was their ROI.”
The difficulty for FlexPrint was transforming the operations digitally, and the pushback from users who were accustomed to the previous workflow. Even in trying to set expectations for what the new workflow would look like, it required much hand-holding and assurance that the new workflow would pay dividends.
“You’re in a bit of a major learning curve going from analog to digital in a workflow process,” Behm related. “That’s the challenging side of it. That also creates a time lag of getting to the point where people understand this is what we’re going to build and this is what we’re going to roll out. But once we get to that point, usually in a month or two, we can get that done.”
Signed, Sealed, Delivered
If there was one client that was ever in need of a workflow process revamp, it was this customer of Chandler, Arizona-based Imagine Technology Group (ITG). The customer sends out worker injury claims to its client’s end users, which number nearly 3,000 documents per day. ITG’s client would print out the documents in no particular order—an eight-page document for company A, a two-page document for company B, and a six-page document for company C. Mailroom employees would then take the documents, manually fold them and insert them into envelopes for mailing.
In what was perhaps the biggest rub, the employees would have to fold many of the document packets differently to position the mailing address to appear in the window. There could be 20 to 30 different clients, and the mailing address was variably placed. It provided for a highly manual-intensive process to marry the forms with the proper address positioning.
Mark Lasinis, director of technology for ITG, turned to FlexStream, an output management software, to provide the client with much-needed relief. ITG used the software to analyze the PDFs, determine their first and last pages, scrape the address off, send them through a system to cleanse it, and have it sorted in order to lower the cost of postage. A cover page was added, to which the mailing address was applied to a static position, and each page was bar coded. Thus, when the document packages were put into a folder/inserter, the client would be assured all the correct pages were being sent to the intended recipient. This helped assure HIPAA compliance and eliminated the chance for human error.
“Now, once the client releases the job, the software program does all of this work behind the scenes and immediately starts printing them out,” Lasinis said. “They can then put the printed stacks into the inserter, take the finished envelopes out of the other end and run them through the mailing machine.”
Where the process formerly took a day among four employees (including the department manager), it is now completed in half a day, at most, courtesy of one operator. As one employee was retiring, her position did not need to be filled, and the two other workers can focus on other tasks.
And that was just the initial savings. The client spent $50,000 a month on postage, but now that it’s collated and presorted, they’re likely saving about five cents per mailing piece. The client is also purchasing its own mailing permit for preprinting on envelopes, which will provide additional savings. The deployment is so recent that the client hasn’t fully calculated its overall savings.
ITG also stands to benefit from the process automation, as the client is using a portion of its savings to upgrade their copier systems. In the post-sale feedback sent to the client, ITG received six stars…on a scale of one to five.
“The customer could not have been more pleased,” Lasinis offered. “It allows us to look at other parts of their business. The customer’s attitude is, ‘If we can do this just on the mailing portion, and you specialize in workflow automation and document management, what other areas of our company can you help us with?’ Their CFO absolutely loves us and our involvement.”
