Corporate Express' Document & Print Management (CEDPM) division is a leading provider of comprehensive document management, and forms, label and direct mail print solutions. With eight manufacturing plants, a centralized Premedia Service Group and more than 50 sales offices, CEDPM's online ordering, print management programs and customized solutions help Fortune 1000 companies reduce hard costs and improve internal processes.
The Premedia Service Group of CEDPM-located in Lenexa, Kansas, and with 22 employees-has put its expertise to work in its own business with the help of MetaCommunications. In 2004, the group was looking for a way to streamline its order entry process, eliminating inefficient paper-based processes by implementing a digital workflow. Marianne Curtis, Graphic Artist, was with the Premedia Service Group when this project was initially undertaken. She says, "Not only were we interested in implementing a paperless order entry workflow, but we were also expecting to gain the ability to better track jobs through our process, including the amount of billable time spent on each as well as its status in the queue."
The Premedia Service Group receives orders from the company's sales team for production in its form, label and direct mail plants. Curtis says, "When an order comes in, we receive the artwork and prepare it for production in one of our plants, sending the plant the digital plates for use on press. Each job has, at a minimum, a job number and form number associated with it, and can consist of as many as three to four sub-tickets as it works its way through the order entry, preflight, proof-and-review, alteration and final production processes. With our previous paper-based process, each time a job came into the shop it was treated as a new job, even if it was a reprint of an earlier project or an iteration of an active project. This resulted in a lot of unnecessary rework since there wasn't easy access to historical information." In addition to its premedia work, group members were also fielding a large number of calls from internal customers asking about job status, which took time to track down.
Virtual Ticket and Job Manager have made our lives around here much easier, improved the quality of customer service we deliver, and saved us a significant amount of time and rework.
Marianne Curtis, Graphic Artist
Curtis came to the group with expertise in process management and data collection, and applied that expertise to their implementation of MetaCommunications' Job Manager and Virtual Ticket. The Job Manager database was populated with information about the group's internal customers — its sales force and plants — including billing information. "In Virtual Ticket," says Curtis, "we created a custom job ticket that exactly met our needs. Not only did we need to track each job from the perspective of the sales rep or plant that sent it in, we also wanted to track who the end client was. That enabled us to begin to build a thorough history that allowed us to not only easily recognize jobs that were back for another step in the process or for reprinting, but also to determine at a glance what the key preferences of the end client were. Now we know exactly who worked on a given job, what we have done, how many times it has been in and for what — in other words, we have a much better understanding of the job and are able to process it much more efficiently." One custom form within Virtual Ticket that helps with this process is the Client Specification Sheet, which allows any specifications that are specific to a client to be kept with their records. Curtis adds, "Now we don't have to recapture information or rely on memory. Additional information is collected as we do more work for that client, and if an operator hasn't done work for a specific client recently, the information is easily accessible for review.
According to Curtis, when a job previously came in, a simple paper job ticket was completed. "Although it may now take us a little longer to enter a job on the front end, we are saving a significant amount of time on the back end that more than justifies the up-front work." She also points out that since CEDPM's Premedia Service Group is ISO 9001:2000 certified, the group uses Virtual Ticket to enter and track all of the process improvement reports, as well as other required documentation that must be logged in accordance with the ISO Quality Management System.
Virtual Ticket has even made some Human Resources practices at CEDPM more efficient. Curtis reports that the group uses Virtual Ticket to enter time off requests. She says, "We can easily see what days we have already taken. When we enter a request, an e-mail request is automatically generated and sent to the appropriate manager, who can either approve or deny the request and then send an auto notification back to the employee." The Premedia Service Group also tracks employee quality using Virtual Ticket. Each job has a form where errors are recorded, and at the end of each month, Crystal Reports generates a report that compiles quality statistics by employee, generating a rating for each employee for that month.
"We have found a multitude of uses for Virtual Ticket and Job Manager," says Curtis. "It has made our lives around here much easier, improved the quality of customer service we deliver, and saved us a significant amount of time and rework."
