Challenge
A leading Benefits Administrator was struggling to maintain its in-house print and mail operations—suffering from high overhead costs and low productivity. The company was incurring unnecessary costs to maintain three facilities in North America, with wasted square footage and an under-utilization of equipment. It was experiencing a high volume of inventory (over 5,000 individual items) because it lacked any integrated printing capabilities, as well as a digital inventory management system. Its infrastructure did not support automation—workers had to manually accommodate highly customized jobs for each client, which required additional print runs and picking and matching inventory for kit fulfillment. There was also no inherent Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity solution. This meant that materials had to be physically shipped from one location to the other, which resulted in a 2-day delay. Fragmented, manual-based workflows (kit fulfillment) led to low productivity across sites, and slower print and fulfillment turnaround. Finally, production operations were not being leveraged for additional lines of business.
Solution
To address these challenges, Exela absorbed all of the company’s inbound processing and outbound print and mail operations, which included: production, fulfillment, return mail management, postal optimization, supply chain inventory optimization, and customer communications management. For starters, all operations were migrated over to Exela’s Mega Center and production facilities. This relieved the company of excessive overhead costs for real estate, security, technology and infrastructure. The implementation was rolled out over the course of a year to accommodate the transfer of hundreds of individual jobs, while User Acceptance testing took place at one of the facilities before any job went live. To help streamline, standardize, and unify operations; Exela rebadged more than two hundred workers. Formerly manual processes, such as customized print and fulfillment activities, were automated. Exela was also able to leverage its wide-reaching supplier network to secure the most competitive rates and drive economies of scale.
Benefits
- Reduced total spend by 20%; savings anticipated to increase year-over-year via value reengineering
- Provided a scalable solution that meets sudden demand spikes and future growth
- Optimized operations by creating fluid workflows; eliminating under-utilized real estate and resources; and integrating automation
- Eliminated the need to make capital investments
- Drove economies of scale by utilizing Exela’s supplier ecosystem of $1B in procurement spend
- Mitigated risk through highly trained employees, detailed process documentation, and proven business continuity plans
- Eliminated management of the hourly workforce
- Introduced new color, onsert printing capabilities to reduce time, inventory volumes, and manual resources
