Achieve remarkable results in Business Process OPtimization by working from backwards from the delivered document set.

1. Optimized Document Business Processing
Introduction
Most of the organizations need and send out documents to communicate with its internal and
external customers. Documents in this context can be every piece of formal information through any
media. Either the traditional paper or can also be an e-mail, an SMS message or an XML file. All these
type of documents are created within a business process by employees or information systems. The
final delivery of the physical documents is usually done through the mailroom of an organization.
Before the mailroom there is the print production centre. Here all the documents of the organization
are printed, inserted in envelopes and sent by regular postal services. In the last years a lot of effort
has been done to optimize the internal business process through Business Process Redesign and all
sorts of techniques. Also the print and mailroom are being optimized with all sorts of software
packages to optimize the manual document handling activities. A combination where the business
process of document handling and production is linked with the process of publishing is nearly found.
This lack of integration still leads to a lot of waste in the process (Lean), errors in the final delivery of
the document (six sigma) and issues within the closed loop processes.
Business Issues
Lean Six Sigma techniques are frequently used to optimize the internal business processes. The usage
of Lean Six Sigma to optimize the production processes n a print and mailroom are not yet so
common. This creates a gap between the optimized internal business process which create their
output in an efficient way and the print and mailroom that needs to take care of the final delivery
steps. This could lead to a lot of issues in e.g., the print and mailroom where different documents
need to be merged into a single mail piece. Due to the fragmented delivery of the documents to the
print and mailroom a lot of additional work needs to be done to create a faultless process. The
internal process and the print and mailroom might be optimized at an individual level. But since the
processes are not aligned with each other an undefined amount of time is lost to bridge the separate
processes. Only up till the moment where both processes are examined in an integrated Lean Six
Sigma approach there is only sub optimization.
Reference case
At a large global Insurance company which issued Life Insurance policies the integrated optimization
using Lean Six Sigma techniques brought remarkable results. The initial question from the Insurance
Company was to reduce the average publishing (printing) window of the policies from 12 hours to 8
hours. This based on the issue that the policy distribution process took too long during peak
moments. After further investigation of the whole process it became clear that the issue of a policy
took 15 days due to all sorts of waiting moments in the authorization processes. By redesign of the
publishing process the authorization process could be done in parallel steps and based on electronic
information. The final result was that the complete average business process from request to policy
delivery could be reduced from 15 days to 3 days.
© DocsTalk 2008 Page 1

2. Optimized Document Business Processing
Recommendations
The recommendations below are a summary of the activities which need to be done to enable the
optimization of an integrated document business and publishing process.
Map the business process with the (IT) applications used. Not from a task perspective but
•
from a document perspective.
Do a Root Cause Analysis of the Print and Mailroom inefficiencies
•
Describe the full document structure with the delivery applications. (E.g. which applications
•
create which piece of the final document? Being a Insurance policy, Training manual, etc)
Optimize the print and mailroom processes
•
Work up and optimize the business processes and the applications used to create the
•
documents.
Revised process
1st DAY OVERNIGHT
Check
Authorization
(3)
Remote Mainframe
Data entry
Key
(1)
data
Application
(4)
Form
Composition
OCR Images
Scanning
Archive
(2)
Job splitting
(5)
(7)
(6)
Print Bind Print Staple
Electronic signature
No name check
In-line check print
(8)
QC
All elements of waste and non-
value add have removed. Optimized (9)
Lean Manufacturing. Packing Life/PA
2nd DAY
Reduction in errors through
automation. Reaching 6σ level.
8
© DocsTalk 2008 Page 2