Big, And Getting Bigger
At number 10 on the Top 50 list, John Hancock Financial Services is a mailing juggernaut.
By Mike Llewellyn
JOHN HANCOCK Financial Services' Document Solutions Group is one big operation. Boasting $19.5 million in annual sales (a 26.6 percent increase from last year) and a staff of 145 full timers, the in-plant jumped up one slot on the Top 50 this year to join the top 10.
All of this follows up a 2000 consolidation of the company's four printing and mailing operations together under one suburban Boston roof—and under the jurisdiction of General Director Scott London. The effects of the three-year-old move haven't resulted in a large number of acquisitions over the past year, though London says he has just replaced the shop's fully depreciated Océ 2075s with 750s.
Located in Hyde Park, Mass., the John Hancock in-plant runs like a giant machine, with data arriving in nightly torrents to be printed, sorted and mailed by the end of the next day.
"We do transactional-based statements, bills, reports and a variety of one- and two-color marketing materials," he says.
While the in-plant can handle various tasks, its primary function is printing and mailing those bills and statements. The shop is channel-connected to a mainframe at the company's Boston headquarters. At the headquarters, the data is organized and prioritized before being sent over a number of T1 lines to the Hyde Park facility. From there the data is directed into varying print classes, and it is then printed, for the most part, on the shop's arsenal of Océ 750, 372 and 462 black-and-white equipment, the latter two of which are continuous-feed machines.
"Once it's printed, it's quality-checked and then moved to mailing," explains London.
What this pans out to is an average of 300,000 pages a day getting printed, packed and mailed. London reports that the in-plant sends 10 million pages to its customer's customers every month.
He says he's sticking with Océ equipment for a number of reasons.
"We established a relationship with them about eight years ago, and when we implemented the equipment, it handled the data very well," he says. For the latest batch of cut-sheet, black-and-white printers, London says that company came in with the lowest cost.
Next door to the printing department is the mailing and fulfillment operation. Operators place the stacks of printed materials on rolling material handlers and wheel them into the next facility. There, they are matched up with mailing job tickets and loaded into Böwe Bell & Howell and Pitney Bowes inserters.
"The print-to-presort takes place from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.," London says.
At the end of the day those 300,000 printed pages have collapsed into 70,000 mailing pieces presorted on a Böwe Bell & Howell Jet Star presorter and addressed, when necessary, by a Scitex ink-jet machine.
At this point the in-plant's on-site postal inspector goes over the mailing to make sure all the details check out. With his go-ahead, a United States Postal Service truck arrives to take the day's work and ferry it to Boston's South Postal Annex.
London acknowledges that most in-plants with major mailings are forced to drive them to the post office. But with such a massive amount of mail leaving the facility every day—millions of dollars worth each year—a mistake not caught until the documents reach the South Postal Annex would mean rerunning the entire job, at a huge cost in time and money.
"At that point, it's too late because everything is stale-dated," he says. "If there are any issues we know immediately."
As for the operation as a whole, sometimes it's worth it to just sit back and take it all in.
"The Document Solutions Group facility is here to help Hancock's sales channels be the fastest to market, with the highest levels of quality," he says. "This is a great model" IPG
General Director Scott London helped steer John Hancock Financial Services' Document Solutions Group through the merger of its four printing and mailing operations. It now ranks 10th on the IPG Top 50.
