Automation and integration of business processes and systems invariably provide significant cost savings to any organization, and the mailing industry is no exception. Posts and commercial mailers want to reduce their postage/shipping costs and labor costs in any way possible. The key to doing so is to increase the efficiency and automation of their operations. A significant impediment to these goals is the lack of integration between software applications along with an end-to-end solution to manage mailings. Many mailers are challenged by the inefficiencies that arise as they struggle to execute using a variety of applications, including:
- Presort and post presort/software applications
- Software to create and manage appointments
- Tracking software
- Palletization software
- Software for scorecard processing
- Software to create manifests
- e-Induction
- Seamless Acceptance
Besides integrating the above applications and workflows, we don’t think how integrating delivery organizations and mailing industries CRM, billing, financial A/R, A/P, general ledger, Sales, Marketing, pricing, Transportation Management systems can create new value if integrated with operational and inventory management systems. Providing new insights throughout the entire organizational portfolio and allowing companies to manage their companies by managing data.
View the video: How Automating Business Processes Leads to Cost Savings
Presenter: Tariq Mirza, EVP of Postal Logistics Consulting
Today, many posts and commercial mailers use disparate systems to manage these areas. The downsides to doing that are considerable, resulting in added expense in software and labor as well as the cost of decreased productivity.
- Software costs—It’s expensive to buy, install, configure, maintain and support multiple systems.
- Labor costs—In some cases, multiple people need to be hired to manage these disparate systems. In addition to the direct costs of labor, there’s also a training cost (and, if that individual leaves the company, the cost of re-training his or her replacement).
- Lack of data integration—Having data input and output to and from multiple systems makes it impossible to obtain end-to-end visibility into mailing operations. Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for simplified data sharing can make this easier but do not solve the fundamental issue that data might still exist in silos. This lack of integration also leads to untimely receipt of data that should ideally be received as close to real-time as possible.
- The inefficiency of manual processes—Lack of automation commonly requires a need to pull data manually from one system and import them into another, which not only adds to labor costs but also carries a risk of human error, which can lead to serious customer satisfaction and retention issues.
Automating business processes through an integrated solution eliminates the impact of inefficiencies due to disparate systems. Assurety Integrated Mailing Solution (AIMS) platform is a centralized, web-based, integrated suite of applications to manage all essential mailing functions. The benefits of a unified platform include:
- Reduced software and labor costs
- End-to-end visibility into processes
- Workflow/process improvements that facilitate the measurement of the impact of change to one step on the efficiency of the entire process
- Automation to eliminate manual processes, reduce errors, and simplify the entire operation
- Greater automation discounts
The value of custom software development and integration services for the Parcel and post industry is a high need as well and that is a service that Assurety provides at inexpensive rates with high postal logistics expertise.
To operate profitably, posts and commercial mailers must reduce costs and increase efficiencies wherever possible in their processes. Automation and integration of processes is key to reducing costs associated with the maintenance and operation of software, and perhaps more importantly, is essential to a mailer’s ability to identify, implement and measure process improvements. For mailers, automation is critical to the bottom line.
