Reducing Touch Points: More Printing and Less Administrating
Let’s talk about touch points in print production. There is no single one big thing set to dominate the printing landscape. Rather, the broad consensus is that the key to thriving in today’s industry is expanding your offerings, increasing your efficiency, and investing in technology wisely. Today, we’re going to focus on that second key point but also look at how it runs parallel to the other two.
“Reducing touch points”; it’s a term that gets thrown around a lot but not often thoroughly defined. It’s easy to intuitively understand what it means to “reduce touch points” in your operations, but harder to put it into practice. It starts with knowledge: evaluating how your systems operate today, deciding what your goals are for improving those systems, and finally figuring out how to achieve those efficiency goals and implement the needed changes.
The industry-wide trend of focus on reducing touch points is for good reasons. Automating processes and reducing touch points is one of the most effective ways to reduce errors, save money and time, and do more with less.
Evaluating Your Workflows
This starts with a simple question, and it all comes down to that vital phrase “touch points”: How many touch points are required for a job to travel from ordering to shipment?
Touch Points: Every discrete process required to move a job through the workflow.
In other words, touch points are simply the manual actions taken in order to get orders out the door. This includes everything from ripping the print-ready file to sending the invoice, and much more in between.
The first step in evaluating your workflow to look for areas for improvement is simply taking stock of the touch points in your workflow. Of course, this gets a little more complicated when you add in the variation between different types of jobs, but think of it as creating workflow categories. You’ll have your offset job workflow, your variable data printing workflow, etc. All of these workflows will have their own typical sets of touch points that move the job along.
You can list out these typical processes for the various common types of jobs, who is responsible for these touch points, and by doing so, create a map of your production workflow structure. Once you’ve mapped out the structure of your production workflows, its time to determine what your bottlenecks are.
Bottlenecks are Opportunities
Instead of thinking of bottlenecks in your production workflow as something negative and thus best ignored, it’s more beneficial to see workflow bottlenecks for what they really are: opportunities for workflow improvement that can result in easy increases in efficiency and reduction in errors.
Once you’ve categorized your various production workflows it’s time to determine which of the many touch points along those workflows are causing the most trouble. “Trouble” in this sense could refer to anything from the number of errors that tend to occur at a certain touch point, the amount of time a touch point eats up, or a combination of both.
To spot error-prone touch points, look at the types of jobs that end up needing correction at the end of their workflow and trace back the steps to point where the issues tend to originate. To spot time-eating touch points, start by taking a close look at moments in the workflow where multiple people are involved in a single step, where approvals tend to hold up moving through the process, or where the same step needs to be repeated multiple times.
Automation Can Be Straightforward
The third stage in reducing touch points is where changes are actually implemented. That can make this part of the journey the scariest, but that’s just a matter of framing. What should be scarier than changing things is keeping things the same. Keeping bottlenecks in your workflows the way they are can cost you time and money and seriously affect not only your short-term revenue but your long-term growth. That’s scarier than any temporary uncertainty that arises when undergoing automation implementation.
In many cases, automation is as straightforward as finding the right tools that fit your business. As an example, the right web to print solution can automate certain repetitive and tedious actions within the production workflow. For enterprise print customers, web to print portals are invaluable for automating the process of ordering. Proofing can be done entirely by the end user, approvals can be streamlined via automated emails, and print-ready files can be delivered to production without any intermediary manual touch points.
The Margin for Error Is Shrinking
The big picture isn’t optimization and increased efficiency merely for the sake of it. The big picture when it comes to automation and reducing touch points is that the modern print industry is an “adapt or fall” world. Technology is making it simultaneously easier to grow as a printer than ever before, but also more competitive.
The margin for error is shrinking and that is the primary driver for this increased focus on automation in printing and reducing touch points. Print service providers are catching on to this fact. On the operations end, investment in tools for automation results in a more efficient workflow, reduced labor costs, and reduced turn times. On the customer end, these benefits translate to greater retention, more satisfied customers, deeper customer relationships, and more order volume. These are the principles that underline the importance of reducing touch points, both on the shop floor and in the customer’s email inbox.
