Consolidation Pays Big Dividends for Fidelity

It has long been said that trust is the hardest thing to earn and, when lost, virtually impossible to regain. For many people, the most difficult decision is entrusting a stranger or an entity to provide maintenance and care to our loved ones and money. Reputation and results are everything. An epic failure irrevocably damages custodians of family and finances. There are no second chances.

On the fiscal end, Fidelity Investments is a leading mutual fund company that provides comprehensive workplace savings plans and is synonymous with Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs). It counts retirement planning, portfolio guidance, brokerage services and other financial products among its dossier of products for 20 million-plus individuals and institutions. Fidelity has $3.74 trillion in assets under administration, including $1.65 trillion of managed assets.

For a firm that maximizes return through sound investment strategies, the company itself must embody these principles in its internal operations. Not surprisingly, Fidelity Investments’ in-plant, Document Printing Services (DPS), mirrors its parent company’s core values. Its mission is to provide its inward-facing clients with high-quality, efficiently produced materials via its 9,000-square-foot facility at the Boston headquarters or through its remote locations in Westlake, Texas, and Salt Lake City.

The commander in chief of DPS is Michael Luzzo, vice president of Fidelity Investments, and a dyed-in-the-wool company man. Luzzo has guided DPS through the greatest transformation in its 40-odd year history—a consolidation that concentrated four New England printing facilities into one. It included an equipment change-out and software augmentation that is making the in-plant sleeker, and increasing effectiveness and efficiency.

Relevant to the Corporation

Make no mistake about it, serving the overall mission of Fidelity Investments is the alpha and omega of Luzzo’s objectives. But it is that singularity of focus that has compelled Luzzo and his 23-employee crew to deliver an offering that enables it to remain relevant to the corporation.

“We, collectively, have a fiduciary responsibility to the firm that we’re going to run this in-plant to the best advantage of Fidelity Investments,” Luzzo proclaims. “If it is concluded, through benchmarking or other analytical method, that this isn’t the best way to run this shop, then it is our responsibility to recommend to the firm to do it in some other way.”

Fidelity Investments’ printing structure is two-pronged. It has a separate division, run out of Covington, Ky., that provides all of the end user-facing print, including statements, confirmations and checks. DPS does most of the enterprise printing that supports the business units, an all-digital configuration that produces (among other things) presentations, bound booklets, brochures, flyers, name tags, training manuals and posters.

The Westlake and Salt Lake City facilities, microcosms of the Boston headquarters, each operate in 2,000-square-foot facilities.

Equipment Lineup

DPS has a distinctly Xerox flavor to its printing arsenal. Boston has three Color Press 1000s, two Nuvera 144s and a Nuvera 288. Salt Lake City has a DocuColor 700 and a Nuvera 100, while Westlake boasts a Nuvera 120 and a DocuColor 7000. Each of the sites features wide-format capabilities: Boston and Westlake have the Canon iPF 9100, while Salt Lake has an HP. In terms of finishing equipment, DPS uses C.P. Bourg and Duplo booklet makers, inline GBC punchers, Wire-O binders and lamination equipment.

While DPS does offer scanning and some fulfillment, digital printing represents a lion’s share of its work. It produces 40 million black-and-white and color impressions per year (by contrast, Covington churns out 235 million).

“We support every Fidelity business unit, which includes those that are selling Fidelity-defined benefit plans and contribution plans,” Luzzo explains. “Once those sales plans—generally in quantities of 10 to 20 presentations—are successful, those customers are then supported by our Covington print group. There’s a fair amount of work that goes external, but it’s driving revenue and additional sales, supporting our business units. The critical work that we do supports our portfolio managers, presentations to support sales proposals and presentations for existing customers.”

Carrying Out the Consolidation

The DPS makeover was designed to not only make the in-plant more efficient and cost effective, but enable it to continue serving the enterprise in a forward-looking fashion. Fidelity had opened regional sites over the years, and those sites were fortified by individual print centers. In order to make the printing function leaner and better equipped to serve the enterprise, the print centers in Marlborough, Mass., Merrimack, N.H., and Smithfield, R.I., were consolidated into Boston. Printing needs for those regional sites are satisfied via courier or its internal mail group (which Luzzo also oversees).

DPS tapped a consultant to help strategize the logistics of the print center, which was accompanied by the equipment change out. That entailed reducing 10 cut-sheet digital print engines in New England to six. The additions saw three Color Press 1000s, two Nuvera 144s and one Nuvera 288. During the makeover, DPS was able to refresh the monochrome print engines in Salt Lake City (Nuvera 100) and Westlake (Nuvera 120).

The firm bolstered its wide-format equipment, adding two Canon iPF 9100s in Boston and Westlake, which replaced older gear.

The consolidation was wrapped up in 2010 and the equipment makeover was finalized early in 2011. Also in 2010, DPS invested in software (EFI’s Pace, Digital StoreFront, Fiery Central and PrintFlow) that will automate workflows, improve scheduling and billing functions, as well as allow it to capture more metrics. The software will round out the in-plant’s makeover.

Luzzo is excited about the EFI package rollout. Pace and Digital StoreFront are slated to go live this month, with Fiery Central and PrintFlow ticketed for the fourth quarter. All of these tools will be integrated, giving DPS the distinction of being the lone in-plant with such a configuration.

Digital StoreFront will have an immense impact, given that it is a customer-facing application that will provide users with a Windows-based, shopping cart-based system for print procurement that Luzzo believes will help drive more visibility and work for DPS. Having a state-of-the-art job submission application and workflow application that can, for example, accept XML feeds from outside firms to produce work for DPS’s business partners, could bolster the in-plant’s color volume by as much as 35 percent in the coming year.

In fact, Luzzo believes color work will represent as much as 50 to 55 percent of DPS’s output in the next year or two, up from the current level of 32 percent. Much of the growth will be powered by sales proposal and review work.

“The Xerox 1000 print engines that we have here produce iGen-like or better quality color,” Luzzo says. “It’s really eye popping, and when folks see that, they want to use more of it.”

DPS does not have the right of first refusal, nor does it accept outside work. By the same token, there has never been an attempt to privatize Fidelity’s print needs. The in-plant captures a sizeable portion of the work that can be done in-house simply due to DPS’s ability to provide the utmost in cost savings and a high degree of confidentiality. Those attributes simply cannot be afforded by a third-party commercial concern, he says.

Growth Opportunities

While there are no immediate plans for additions at DPS—after all, the equipment makeover is just 18 months old—there are avenues of growth available. Opportunities abound, including variable data printing at the job-shop level. Wide-format printing is just scratching the surface at DPS, and Digital StoreFront could well be the catalyst to foster growth.

“How do you talk to business partners about different substrates and the various things you can do without having a visual?” Luzzo poses. “That’s where Digital StoreFront is going to help us out”—by providing the visual. “It’s not poster printing we’re offering, it’s wide-format print, and it’s a different animal.”

DPS maintains a high level of visibility within the enterprise, courtesy of posters, internal communications, open houses and partnerships with internal support groups, such as procurement. The emphasis, according to Luzzo, is on being a proactive, not reactive, in-plant.

“We know everything is under a constant state of change,” he says. “We’d be foolish to believe things will stay the same for the next five years. Technology and capabilities requirements are going to change. But I think the expectation is, we’re going to be in lock step with that.

“It goes back to our value proposition of finding a way to do work efficiently and effectively. We’re allocating our costs, so we should have an advantage right out of the gate over for-profit printers,” he concludes. “If we have the capability to print it, then it’s got to be cheaper if we’re an efficiently run organization.”