Product category:
Direct Mail Printing and Services
News Release from: OTM-Opus Trust Marketing | Subject: Outsourced administrative document production
Edited by the Printingtalk Editorial
Team on 03 March 2005
OTM Manages Outsourced Business Admin
Documents
Logically, it would seem practical and economical for one of the biggest companies in the direct mail sector, with a GBP373 million turnover, to manage all its administrative requirements in-house.
Logically, it would seem practical and economical for one of the biggest companies in the direct mail sector, with a GBP373 million turnover, to manage all its administrative requirements in-house Despite that, recruitment and temporary employment company, Reed, has chosen to outsource some of the core elements of its operation
This article was originally published on Printingtalk on 1 Aug 2005 at 8.00am (UK)
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Reed is one of the biggest names in the UK recruitment and temporary employment business.
Having started as a one-man-band in 1960, it has grown in to a business with more than 3,000 staff working from 300 branches nationwide.
Employment is said to be one of the country's most volatile market sectors, subject not only to the vagaries of the economy but to a traditionally fickle customer base where personnel skills are the currency and the demands for these change year-on-year.
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The Reed story is not entirely unusual for a company that has grown organically.
Originally covering all services in-house, as business grew it gravitated to using bureau payroll services.
The installation of an Oracle database in 1999 meant the bureau services were no longer needed but there was a requirement to print payslips, cheques and P45s.
Initially, Reed kept its options open, using OTM for payslips and another supplier for invoices.
Ultimately, it was customer service that won the day and monthly statement and invoice printing was switched to OTM in 2003.
OTM said that its expertise lies not just in customer service, to which it rightly gives a priority but to innovations and technical knowledge that save its customers time and money.
For Reed, OTM has developed a method of printing temporary staffing timesheets on the reverse of the invoices it sends to client companies.
As well as saving paper, it means the recipients do not need to spend time marrying the two.
The process sounds straight forward but in fact is very sophisticated, said OTM and it involves the type of development and investment that would probably be uneconomical for any business other than a specialist print operation, the company believes.
The information for invoices is received by OTM as a PDF image with a companion file, which allows the company to reconstruct and mailsort the data.
The statements are sent in Postscript, again reconstructed and mailsorted.
OTM marries up the data, prints and despatches the documents, utilising best postal rates and options, from its purpose-build Leicester facility.
Effectively the service saves Reed from the messy and time-consuming business of paper-chasing, added OTM.
The marketing possibilities linked in to the service are varied, believes OTM.
Any organisation that sends out bills has a ready-made route to its customers and in the company's opinion it seems surprising that until now, bills have been viewed as a cost and a drain on resources, rather than as a marketing opportunity.
OTM claimed to have led the market in developing software that segments billing databases and prints individual marketing messages on to each bill or statement, using the white space available.
Trials with car rental company Avis have yielded a claimed 10 per cent response rate to promotions with both B2B and B2C customers.
The company also believes that Reed, operating entirely within a B2B market, will be a real test of the power of transactional mail.
OTM believes that a service such as temporary employment is used by companies of all sizes and owner, managers and entrepreneurs of cost centres within larger companies tend to view business bills in the same way as they would personal ones.
OTM's research shows that recipients of bills spend a lot longer looking at the bills than a piece of direct mail - around 2.9 minutes compared to 21 seconds.
According to OTM, this blurring of boundaries seems likely to continue as more stringent permission-based legislation puts homes out of bounds to direct marketers but still enables company workers to be targeted.
The trend is already apparent to small-business owners and in everybody's email inbox, where there tends to be a mixture of business and personal mail.
Current discussions between Reed and OTM are focussing on the unplanned element of transactional mail - standardised letters.
OTM said that standardised letters are amongst the most expensive mail items that any company sends.
They are one-offs, often sent out in reaction to a call or email and require the sender to leave their desk.
They do not qualify for postal discounts but are usually considered urgent and tend to be sent first-class.
Many companies do not even know what they spend on reactive standard letters but estimates are around GBP1.50 each and for a company the size of Reed, that can be a substantial total sum, added OTM.
OTM's Outbox product is claimed to reduce that cost to as low as 30 pence per letter by receiving the data electronically, automating the print and fulfilment process and using OTM's bulk mailing services to achieve postal discounts.
Any B2B supplier works in a highly-competitive market and the businesses that harness every single opportunity to communicate with, and sell to, their customers are the ones that will prosper, in OTM'sa opinion.
The company said that such an approach may represent a new mindset, but all companies need to stop thinking of bills as a necessary evil and start regarding them as a significant marketing opportunity.
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