DOCUMENT Magazine - April 2008 - (Page 9)

What equipment is right for my business? Should I own a lot of moderately fast equipment or a few really fast machines — or a combination of both? Should I look toward equipment replacement this year or next — or when? Every two to three years, managers are faced with these and similar questions. Equipment vendors woo document production businesses with speed improvements and promises of more (production volume) with less (equipment). But how should managers evaluate vendor claims? How should they manage their capacity? Process analysis provides answers to utilization and capacity questions. It allows managers to analyze utilization through monthly, weekly, quarterly and annual cycles. By doing so, it provides a clear view of current capacity and the sufﬁciency of that capacity to absorb speciﬁc new work or top-level expected volume growth. It allows managers to rely on their own data to determine whether low-speed, medium-speed or high-speed equipment is right for their work mix. ﬁle receipt through delivery to the U.S. Postal Service. The key consideration to keep in mind during this mapping exercise is identifying discrete chunks of work. For example, for a medium-sized document processor that pre-sorts its ﬁles, such an initial exercise would identify six processes: (1) ﬁle receipt and job scheduling, (2) data processing, (3) printing, (4) staging and schedule management, (5) inserting and (6) transfer to the USPS. Questioning Your Data 1 How do my people perform? 2 Which of my customers truly drive my business’s proﬁtability? 3 What equipment is right for my business and work mix? The fundamentals — time and output: Against these processes, and as a starting point, time data should be gathered. Once a process analysis program is underway, managers should be able to quickly communicate how much time jobs take to process, print and insert, as well as how much additional time is required in staging, scheduling and transfer. As an important note, output means units per hour. Most often, though not always, it has different meanings for printing and inserting. Printing output is expressed as images, pages or sheets, and inserting output as envelopes per hour. These deﬁnitions roughly correspond to typical bases of revenue and cost. For printing and inserting, output provides the fundamental complement to time. For Working Out Process Analysis Top management commitment: The “how” of process analysis begins with an essential commitment: the absolute, ongoing commitment of top management. Without such a commitment, nothing else matters. Process analysis, ultimately, generates a new decision-making context. New data is gathered. A new framework is established for all sorts of micro and macro decisions — from who works on what equipment when to what equipment to buy for which work. Most of all, the best data in the world doesn’t do the work itself — it needs to be actioned upon. Therefore, the commitment of top management is essential towards ensuring that data will be actioned upon. Beginning process analysis: With the commitment of top management, process analysis begins by mapping a mailed document from www.DOCUMENTmedia.com april.08 document 9 http://www.DOCUMENTmedia.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Document Magazine - April 2008

Document Magazine - April 2008 Contents Editor's View The Research Desk The Response Center BPM: Improving the Way You Process Contributing Writers Mapping Out Performance Build the Context Before You Move into the House of ECM Taking On the Big 3 The Human Connection Addressing Your Addresses Don't Call Us, We'll Call You The Mulitplying Image Recognizing Accuracy New Products Calendar Advertisers

Document Magazine - April 2008

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