I start my day with a regular turn-over meeting; a recap of the status of each job completed (or not) as well as the discussion of any new problems. As part of this meeting my team reviews the workload for the day ahead in order to make sure we have all our bases covered with respect to materials, machines and personnel. This can take from 20 minutes to an hour each morning with a repeat later in the day as part of our day to evening shift turnover meeting.

This particular day started off normally; tasks include creating reports manually to show how many jobs, envelopes and documents we produced in the last 24 hours. The information had to be added to the monthly analysis report; a manual task since there isn’t an automated process.

Then the phone rings; it is Customer Service calling to report that John Doe says he did not get his statement and is not going to pay until he receives it. I know it must have gone out to him, so I dig through the reports to look for the document. 

A few trips to the printer supervisor and inserter supervisor and I learn that it was sent to be reprinted last week. Where is the job that has the reprints? That is truly the $64,000 question. Found it! A quick call back to Customer Service to inform them John Doe’s statement went out yesterday and he should get it tomorrow. That little adventure just wasted 30 minutes of my time.

A short time later…

“What?” I say to our sales team who just landed a large contract. “We can’t print that PDF file; we only print AFP.” Every so often, calls like this come in from the sales team. If only I could easily accept more print-streams as inputs and make them work with the current infrastructure workflow setup. I have looked at various alternative solutions but they are either too expensive or labor intensive.

I need to find a better solution.  

My printer and inserter vendors have been talking to me about installing an Automated Document Factory (ADF). The benefits sound great and they say I can reduce or even eliminate my turn-over meetings by automating and tracking all of my jobs including my reprints. In parallel the system would inform customer service of the status of all our documents.

It all sounds great… that is until they present me with a proposal. There is no way I will be able to get that kind of capital. Even if I could raise the capital to buy new equipment, servers, software, databases and months of professional services to get the ADF running, the implementation time would be untenable.

What I need is to find an ADF that is affordable, scalable and configurable to my existing equipment and processes and one that does not require me to change my processes to match the vendor’s product offerings and software. In short I need what some people might call a magic bullet. No time to think about that now, I have meetings to focus on. 

My 2:00 PM appointment arrives. It is a local sales representative from Crawford Technologies and we discuss CrawfordTech’s PRO Production Manager (PRO PM). With PRO PM’s ability to interface with my existing hardware and software, I don’t have to spend large sums of money to replace working solutions or wait for the benefits for an extended period of time. 

Many of the ADF providers that I have been talking to require each printer and/or inserter be 'upgraded' by the manufacturers in order to interface with their ADF solution. My salesperson shows me the modularity of the CrawfordTech software and how I can track jobs at the piece level throughout the entire process, without expensive hardware upgrades. 

With PRO Production Manager, I can accept the various PDL’s that are coming my way. Adding barcodes for device control is also easy and I can even provide the marketing team with QR code capabilities.  I can also provide electronic distribution and support alternate delivery methods such as Digital Postal Mail solutions like Zumbox, doxo and Volly.

What really attracts me to the CrawfordTech method is the way PRO PM can handle all my reprints in an automated fashion and inform my Customer Service reps of the steps and status of each document. The investment to implement (total cost of ownership) is within my budget and significantly less than other solutions I have considered.

As for reports, with the openness of PRO PM, I can use my company’s existing database and tools to create reports tailored to my operation and requirements. I’m going to need to have another meeting with Crawford Technologies right away to see a proof of concept.

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