The Problem Solvers

Helping customers save time and money is every in-plant's mission. So when Sun Life Financial's Document Services Group discovered that a department was hiring temps to manually stuff envelopes—and taking a week to 10 days to do it—John Moschilli had to take action.

The senior manager of the Document Services Group convinced the department that his in-plant could do this inserting much more quickly and cost effectively using automated processes. To do this, the in-plant added an address page with a barcode on it to each piece. The code told the shop's Pitney Bowes inserters how many pages were in the statement and which inserts to put in the envelope.

"Now we can get this job out in less than three days," says Moschilli. Plus, the barcode removes the risk of double stuffing envelopes, he adds. What's more, the in-plant switched the mailing from a 10x13˝ envelope to a 6x9.5˝ envelope, saving big money on postage.

Providing support like this has earned the in-plant a stellar reputation at the Wellesley Hills, Mass.-based financial services company.

"People view us now as problem solvers," he says.

This is an enviable position for an in-plant, and Document Services has worked hard to attain it. Customers at Sun Life now invite the in-plant to their planning meetings before designing new mailings.

"We're at the table from the beginning, instead of getting a last-minute phone call," remarks Moschilli.

Lean and Busy

Document Services is a lean, extremely busy operation. Moschilli oversees nine employees in two New England locations: seven in a 2,000-square-foot, operation in Wellesley Hills, where the two-person night shift prints, sorts and delivers 500 to 700 jobs—primarily checks and statements—before 7 a.m.; and two in a 1,200-square-foot facility in Windsor, Conn., which essentially mirrors the technology in the main location. Both sites have Konica Minolta bizhub PRO 1200 printers with inline booklet making and perfect binding; both have Kodak Digimaster EX138s and Pitney Bowes DI950 FastPac inserters.

"If something were to happen in one location, we could switch and be printing all that work in the other location instantly," Moschilli remarks.

Cross-training is crucial in this environment, and every employee can run every piece of equipment.

"We're not people heavy," he says. "We have really leveraged technology."

In benchmarking Document Services against other in-plants using IPG's annual list of the largest operations, Moschilli discovered that his shop produces more than double the sales per employee of these other in-plants.

Document Services handles not only print and mail, but scanning and indexing too. Four-color printing makes up about 8 percent of the in-plant's work—items such as marketing materials, post cards and presentations. These jobs are produced on a Konica Minolta biz­hub PRESS C8000 in Wellesley Hills and a Canon imagePRESS C6000 in Windsor.

The bulk of Document Services' work consists of checks, statements, invoices, letters and other mainframe output. The in-plant took over data center printing in 2001 and now outputs an average of 2.1 million pages a month.

The Wellesley facility was renovated about five years ago, and Moschilli took the opportunity to improve the layout for a better workflow. He and his staff take pride in keeping the operation clean, well organized and professional looking, to build customer confidence.

"People drop their jobs off and know they'll get them back done appropriately," he says. This feeling of confidence extends to upper management. Vice presidents have toured the operation and left with renewed respect for the in-plant. Moschilli makes sure they understand how much money the in-plant is saving the company.

Alternatives to Print

This cost savings, though, is not just because of the in-plant's efficient print and mail processes. Sometimes the in-plant saves money by suggesting non-print alternatives.

"We've done more to eliminate print in the past 10 years than we have to grow it," remarks Lance McGinnis, associate director of the Document Services Group. At the in-plant's suggestion, more than nine million pages were eliminated from a single mailing earlier this year when the customer moved from sending statutory prospectuses, which average 30 to 40 pages each, to summary prospectuses, which average about six pages, he says. This had an added benefit of reducing postage costs. In other cases, the in-plant produced PDFs for e-mail distribution, saving a client thousands of dollars in printing costs.

When communicating these savings to the company, McGinnis adds, the in-plant emphasizes the environmental benefits, such as stressing how much energy was saved and how much less waste was produced. By telling customers they saved 6,000 trees or enough energy to heat 20 homes, people can relate to the message better, he says. This has a far greater impact than just talking about dollar savings, he says. Document Services also stresses the operational efficiencies, and reduced postage, storage and shredding costs, McGinnis adds, and most importantly how the change improved the customer experience.

Marketing the In-plant

Promoting the in-plant's benefits to the entire company—with more than 15,000 employees worldwide—is a huge challenge.

"One of the biggest issues is creating an awareness of our services," confirms McGinnis.

Document Services has been actively promoting itself in the past couple years, he says, bringing in senior management for tours and giving Powerpoint presentations on the in-plant's capabilities. This has resulted in more departments consulting with the in-plant in the beginning stages of their projects.

The in-plant also prints flyers touting its services and has an informative Web site, which includes videos about the operation. The shop also works with the internal communications team to develop news stories on its successes and make them available on the company intranet.

Still, in a company so large, some departments continue to overlook Document Services. Moschilli has placed "Stop" signs by copiers, asking users who are spending more than five minutes making copies to consider using the in-plant instead. Because Document Services manages the company's network of printers and copiers, it has a window to see where high-volume work is being done. It can then reach out to those departments to look for opportunities to migrate the print work to the in-plant.

Similarly, McGinnis works with Purchasing to learn who is sending work to outside printers. If those jobs are more appropriate for the in-plant, he or Moschilli will approach the customer. Sometimes they find the departments weren't even aware of Document Services. McGinnis points to one recent example.

"We inadvertently intercepted a courier that was delivering a job from Kinko's [FedEx Office]," he says. Moschilli talked with the department and convinced it to send future work to Document Services.

"We saved them $10,000 just on one job," McGinnis says. "We wound up cutting the volume in half because we gave them PDFs that they could send out [by e-mail]."

An outside printer, he points out, has no incentive to reduce print volume. Document Services, on the other hand, is only concerned about Sun Life's bottom line.

That's a perfect example of the kind of value-added service the in-plant provides for its company. It's not simply looking for ways to keep busy; Document Services is watching for ways to save money for Sun Life Financial and help the company prosper.