Businesses find new ways to cut costs

Businesses and companies around the world are constantly working on ways to improve their services while streamlining their expenses. Many companies have found that they can become more efficient by assembling a strategy that targets process and cost savings in often overlooked areas such as document and mail management.

Large companies have often faced numerous challenges in their copy and mail centres such as very poor uptime on their copiers. Excessive overtime and contract labour costs in the mail centres have also proved detrimental to many businesses, with many companies spending considerable amounts of time trying to find a solution. An effective document and mail strategy combines customer requirements with a supplier’s document expertise, best practices and innovative technology. With this in mind several companies have looked to outsourcing to solve their mail and document management problems.

DPSU, the largest beverage division of global confectionary and beverage giant Cadbury Schweppes, is just one of the companies who decided to go down the outsourcing route in an effort to curtail costs and man hours. The company had been handling its mail centre with internal staff while its copy room was outsourced to an outside service provider. However, there were no established processes in place and service levels were unreliable, leading to employees often taking their copy jobs to outside providers in an effort to meet deadlines. Their mail room fared little better, with disorganisation and a lack of disciplined processes leading to monumental confusion from many of the workers.

However, over a matter of months the companies mail and copy processes were gradually brought up to scratch, with DPSU eventually finding a unified strategy that encompassed both their copy and mail centre needs. Technology such as franking machines also helped save time and money in their mail centre. The ease of use and cost effectiveness of franking has improved mail centres for many businesses, not just large companies, with less internal employees being needed to man the centres and the cheaper postage that franking machines can offer. This coupled with the gritty determination of the company to maintain productivity while reducing expenses led to turnaround in profits and processes for the company.

As long as there is business, there will be companies trying to save money and while bureaucratic cost cutting may have seemed like the simplest solution in the short term, companies now realise that formulating cost cutting strategy in all areas of their business is the key to long term success.

About the Author

Isla Campbell writes on a number of topics on behalf of a digital marketing agency and a variety of clients. As such, this article is to be considered a professional piece with business interests in mind.