Digital Production Enhances Personalised Mailings

Direct marketing specialist Broadsystem, a subsidiary of News International, has enhanced its in-house production capabilities with two Xerox Docutech 90 digital print engines.

Direct marketing specialist Broadsystem, a subsidiary of News International, has enhanced its in-house production capabilities with two Xerox Docutech 90 digital print engines.

Supplied by Xerox production reseller Express Print Solutions (EPS), the new digital print devices complement two existing Xerox machines - a Docutech 75 and a Docucolor 2045, providing the company with added capacity and flexibility for producing personalised client mailings.

The Buckinghamshire (UK) company runs marketing database and multi-channel CRM marketing outsource services and also operates a 300-seat call centre in Bristol, together with a dedicated fulfilment centre in Manchester, the site of the twin Xerox installation.

Digital print production, fulfilment and logistics are elements of a comprehensive menu of direct marketing services at Broadsystem, including database build, management, processing and analytics, customer campaign management, email marketing, call handling and voice recognition.

The company's client base spans a number of industry sectors, including retail, publishing, loyalty and subscription, financial services, travel and leisure, charity, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, IT and telecomms, utilities and public sector.

Head of fulfilment at Broadsystem, Bob Latimer, explained: "Going back about three years, we carved out a strategy to upgrade our output capabilities to stay ahead of client demand.

We were running a bank of eight lower-specified machines, but reliability was becoming an issue in our time-critical direct marketing environment, and we knew we wanted fewer, faster machines.

Looking at all the major digital players, a lot of competitor machines gave the impression of being converted copiers, rather than true production engines.

We felt that Xerox offered by far the best engine technology for our production needs.

The decision in favour of two identical Docutech 90 machines rather than a single, more productive engine was taken for reasons of flexibility.

Latimer added: "At any given time we are running around 70 variable data direct marketing campaigns with run lengths from one to 100,000, all of which are hand-fulfilled to ensure optimum attention to detail.

With such a varied and exacting work profile, it's vital that we have options to move work on to other output engines to accommodate urgent jobs, for example.

According to Broadsystem, the Docutech 90s proved themselves immediately.

According to Latimer: "As we thought, the engines are absolutely built for purpose, and with the faster production technology and the increased flexibility, we've been able to sharpen our unit costs and maintain our competitive edge.

Broadsystem's need for complete integration and a reliable port of call for service and support were also behind its decision to work with Express Print Solutions.

Latimer commented: "Print production for direct marketing is all about service.

We have to react to client demands by the hour, and move rapidly to respond to clients' strategic and tactical needs.

Our expanding digital output capability is critical to our ability to do that and we're aiming to reach a point where clients coming to us for our direct marketing expertise automatically buy in to the benefits of using us for production and fulfilment too.

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