Prepress
Massprinting installs Solimar Systems
Friday 01. September 2017 - Founded in 1991 and headquartered in North Reading, Massachusetts, MassPrinting, Inc. has over twenty years of experience providing document output solutions to meet customers needs.
The Company began as a commercial print business, providing customers with printing solutions from the simplest business cards to complex, highly customized annual reports. In 2001, MassPrinting developed a solution for their first insurance client, converting them from expensive, hard to manage traditional printing to a transactional printing platform with both print and electronic delivery capabilities. This technology driven solution saved the client hundreds of thousands of dollars. MassPrinting has embraced the rapid technological changes in the printing industry and continues to
do so, which has enabled them to become a leader in the document output solutions industry.
Solimar Systems interviewed Barry Crawford, Chief Technology Officer at MassPrinting to discuss how implementing their Solimar solution has allowed them to eliminate document re-engineering outsourcing to reduce the turnaround time of projects while generating new revenue.
“Our new business opportunities revenue has risen more than $90,000 per year thanks to Rubika.”
Barry Crawford
MassPrinting, Inc.
The Challenge
MassPrinting develops and distributes several different types of documents for its clients, including insurance policy documents, financial statements, correspondence, letters, invoices and more. Each of the document types are different and have their own requirements and production challenges.
MassPrinting identified four areas they sought to address and improve with new technology for their document project workflows:
Lack of output control and management
Slow turnaround time of client projects
Lack of operational standardization and production automation
Unable to create, modify or enhance high volume PDF data streams
The incoming client data was often in very poor condition and stretched MassPrintings service provider skill sets beyond what they could handle reliably, quickly, or cost-effectively. If they pushed back on the client to fix the data, this would either place risk on losing the business opportunity and associated revenue, or cause significant project delays. MassPrinting was forced to regularly outsource required re-engineering work to outside print service providers.
Externally outsourced document modification requests out of MassPrintings control were taking two or more weeks to complete and at three times the cost. Production costs were too high and project turnaround time was too long. “We were getting squeezed with higher costs resulting in lower margins because we were externally outsourcing many of the post-composition document modification requirements to third parties,” said Crawford. “When outsourcing takes place you also tend to lose some control over project timelines and schedules, including the all-important client turnaround cycles, which is critical in our business.”
MassPrinting understood the need to make changes to their work processes and production workflows so they could control their own client projects. “Excessive expenses and delayed client projects are always a major concern for service bureaus such as us,” said Crawford. “We needed to find a better approach.”
The Solution
MassPrinting found the solution to address their production challenges with a document enhancement product from Solimar Systems. Solimars Rubika is an award-winning post-composition document re-engineering solution designed to automate manual processes, maximize postal savings, and enhance print data. Unlike other solutions which rely on custom programming, Rubika requires no technical coding at the application level and provides an intuitive user interface to rapidly implement production changes. Rubika can be used to solve a variety of production challenges and may be configured in many different ways to increase efficiencies and profitability, while decreasing project turnaround times.
Using Rubika, MassPrinting now performs most of their frequent document enhancement requests in a matter of a few hours versus several weeks. By adding value to documents and having the ability to make changes and corrections to client projects, MassPrinting quickly realized significant improvements in many facets of their business.
Rubika consists of a series of highly configurable modules or steps that can be combined and configured to satisfy a wide range of production requirements. Examples of document enhancements that Rubika can address include: migration to color, messaging, adding digital inserts, adding or changing barcodes and sequence numbers, adding/deleting pages, standardizing address blocks, masking sensitive information, postal cleanse and sort, and more.
Through the implementation of the new Solimar solution, MassPrinting was able to accomplish the objectives that were set for the new system:
Eliminate all PDF outsourcing to increase margins, generate additional revenue and shorten turnaround time of client projects
Enhance & modify PDF documents to meet customer requirements
Standardize the placement of mailing address blocks
Reduce the effort and costs associated with data manipulation and programming
“We considered other options, but knowing Solimars reputation and their industry experience it was a logical business decision for us to implement Rubika,” stated Crawford. “We also were very aware that Solimar was well known to have one of the best technical support organizations in the industry. And when you need help and are up against a client project deadline, you want someone who can get you through it.”
[With Solimar]… we are saving over $100,000 in development resources costs per year.”
Barry Crawford
MassPrinting, Inc.
The Results
With Rubika, MassPrinting has been able to significantly reduce various production costs. “We have been able to cut our business processing costs by $50,000 per year,” stated Crawford. “That money goes straight to the bottom line.”
By implementing the document enhancement requirements themselves, MassPrinting is now able to better manage workloads and projects. “We have been able to reduce production steps and cut the average client project turnaround time by seven days,” said Crawford. “Now that we control the production process ourselves and have also eliminated the expensive outsourcing, we are saving over $100,000 in development resources costs per year.”
In addition to cutting costs, Rubika has enabled MassPrinting to acquire new customers and retain existing ones, while increasing customer satisfaction levels. “Our new business opportunities revenue has risen more than $90,000 per year thanks to Rubika,” said Crawford.
“We now are able to easily ingest composed PDFs, modify them to move data around, add or subtract pages, index, parse, and concatenate files,” said Crawford. “These files are print ready PDF documents we send to vendors we contract with to execute the actual print process. The overall workflow is much smoother today with Rubika”
“After taking control of the process using Rubika, we are able to perform most of our frequent document enhancement requests in a matter of a couple of hours,” stated Crawford. “This saves us money, moves client jobs into production much quicker and makes for a happy customer. Customer satisfaction is critical in our industry and we must constantly strive to improve. Rubika has allowed us to do just that.”