Written by: Charity Parsons; Market Development Manager, Ricoh Americas

The focus of this article is to help bring greater understanding to the possibilities that abound when looking beyond Phase 1 and 2 of managed print services. For this first installment, I’d like to focus on the simplicity of process improvement. Having been on the sales and consulting side of process improvement for over 10 years, I’ve seen the scale in complexity, scope, risk and return vary significantly. That being said, projects do not have to address operations across the entire enterprise to have significant impact on the organization and its strategic goals. It is sometimes best, particularly if you’ve never managed a process optimization project in the past, to start with process improvements within a single business unit or a single process.

Business process improvement is, most simply, removing or altering steps in a process or workflow. Think of things you do every day that take too much time or require multiple steps to complete; a common example is sharing information via fax. Have you ever sat at your computer, printed a document to the printer down the hall, then walked back to your office to place that same piece of paper in the fax machine and send it to the intended recipient? Nearly every customer I have ever worked with has at least one business unit, if not the whole company, processing information this way. One recommendation to improve the process might be to implement LAN faxing. This technology (already available to most users but simply not utilized) allows the end user to send a fax of any electronic document to a fax machine from his computer. This not only saves time, but also eliminates the need to create the printed page and then recycle it after the fax has been sent. Another option, to solve the same problem, could be to remove fax as a form of communication entirely. This is not possible in every organization, but most are able to eliminate at least 90 percent of faxing by transitioning to more modern digital technologies.

So, let’s look at the root cause of the fax being sent in the first place. It turns out this user was sending a fax to her boss to have it signed for approval. She would then fax the signed copy back to our end user for approval, but would also later mail the document so the original signature could be filed. When the mail arrives and is sorted, the mail clerk would then route this document to the same end user that had already received the fax. This end user would then staple the original to the faxed copy she had received and file the combined document once again. If this process was excruciating to read, imagine how excruciating it is to actually carry out, several times a day, every day. Does this sound like a good use of employee time? If not, consider this second possible business process improvement solution to what initially looked like a very simple problem.

Our end-user is ready to initiate the same approval process described above. This time, however, the end-user has been trained on the new document management system deployed by the organization. The system happens to have a workflow module included in the package. The end-user simply looks over the document she needs signed to make sure it is correct, chooses the document type and clicks the “submit” button on her screen. The document is automatically saved electronically in the system with a date and time stamp when he requested the approval. The supervisor, who once had to go to the fax machine several times per day to retrieve these documents for approval, receives a pop-up that says “approval waiting: priority high.” She clicks on the pop-up and is taken directly to the image of the document. She reviews it, applies an electronic signature and password and clicks the “approved” button on her screen. In less time than it would have taken her to walk down the hall she has completed her portion of the process. The end-user instantly receives a pop-up that says, “Approved document.” She clicks on the pop-up and is able to begin the rest of the process now that the approval is in hand. The document is automatically saved and stored, along with an audit trail displaying who did what and when along the process.

This process optimization changed what used to take over an hour per approval for more than 28,000 approvals per month (28,000 employee hours) organization-wide, to a process that now takes less than 10 minutes (4,667 employee hours). What if this process were occurring in a hospital? I bet every hospital in the nation could benefit from nearly 5,000 extra hours of employee time. This time is currently allocated to administrative tasks, but could instead be allocated to help nurses, physicians, lab techs, etc. Imagine now that this is occurring in a school system. Is there any school that would not like to reduce the teacher to student ratio, increase funding for programs or even pay for bus services that have been cut?

Could your organization benefit from 23,333 extra work hours per month? If so, don’t hesitate to investigate these seemingly necessary tasks in your organization.

This is one example of a very simple and common problem I’ve seen in every organization I’ve worked with over the last 10 years. If you suspect you have similar challenges in your departmental workflows, reach out to your business process improvement partner and begin an analysis of those processes. If your organization does not currently have partnerships with these types of consultants, reach out to the MPSA for members with this expertise and associated case studies and references.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for new project ideas, best practices, and more in future installments of MPS Stage 3, 4 and Beyond: The Ongoing Evolution.

Charity Parsons, Market Development Manager, Managed and Professional Services within Ricoh’s Strategic Marketing Division, is responsible for understanding customer needs and market trends to continually enhance Ricoh’s ability to bring best in class solutions and services to our customers today and in the future. With more than 15 years of experience in the technology solutions and services industry, Charity has held positions in consulting, sales, project management, and marketing. Charity also holds an MBA with a specialty in Healthcare Operations Management along with Imaging Architecture and Change Management Certifications. Most recently, her focus has been on solutions and services such as business process consulting, IT Services and Managed Document Services.