Xerox Global Services: Media Backgrounder (Document Outsourcing Line of Business)

Xerox Global Services is split into three lines of business: Xerox Office Services (XOS); Business Process Services (BPS) and Document Outsourcing. Document Outsourcing comprises seven services: Creative Services; Document Advisor Office; eprintsourcing; Document Production and Publishing; Transactional Document Production; Mailroom Services; and Customer Communication Services.

Documents cost a lot of money: Every organisation in the current climate is trying to increase revenues whilst reducing costs and enhancing productivity. There is one area of spend which is not under control and is not measured. It is Xerox’s experience, endorsed by consultants, that document costs are significant and, more importantly, often not measured in an organisation. Document costs are between 5-15 per cent of an organisation’s revenue with 17-25 per cent of that cost directly related to document output.

Many organisations do not know the cost of documents in their organisations: This means, therefore, that they cannot even begin to reduce and control their document cost. Whilst each service offer delivers its own unique value, the delivery of significant cost savings is common to all offers.

1/7 Creative Services
Xerox provides a whole range of creative services including presentation services; desktop publishing; multimedia; internet and intranet; localisation; and translation. Using expert creative talent, the latest technology, and proven business processes, this service addresses two key issues that face anyone with responsibility for document creation: control and brand integrity. Xerox is able to significantly reduce and control costs associated with creative activity by streamlining processes, optimising work schedules and carrying out activities that normally attract high agency mark-ups as well as through the use of leading-edge technology.

Brand assets (such as collaterals and presentations) are dispersed amongst agencies, designers, printers, employees; all may hold assets locally that, at best, are hard to find and, at worst, are lost as relationships change. Xerox Global Services uses its expertise and digital asset management software to control and catalogue customers’ brand assets centrally. The assets are made available via the web to the customer’s employees, and externally to any agencies, designers, or printers the customer uses. This ensures all the necessary publics are using the most up-to-date and, crucially, the same branding.
Brand integrity ensures that customers are able to communicate consistent, undiluted branding in every market they operate in. The integrity of the brand is protected and costs are therefore reduced through re-use.

2/7 Document Advisor Office (DAO)
DAO saves Xerox Global Services customers thousands of Euros in hidden document costs, and in the case of Lloyds TSB in the UK, saves the bank £3.8 million in costs every year on an annual spend of £28 million. In short, DAO is a service that expedites an organisation’s use, management, and storage of documents.

DAO works by establishing a single point of reference for all documents in an organisation. Part of the reason why so many organisations are unaware of the cost of documents is because of the sheer quantity and variety generated. An example DAO customer organisation might have three facilities, namely an office, a factory, and a warehouse, and each of these three facilities will generate and use documents necessary for its own objectives.

Typically the office might house the finance department, creating invoices and statements, a marketing department that produces collaterals, point of sale materials and direct mail, and a human resources department that uses or produces application forms or training and policy manuals. Meanwhile, the most often used documents in the factory might be production schedules and pick lists, and in the warehouse, documents aiding inventory management are likely to be the most common. In addition, the warehouse is likely to be used to store stocks of hard copy documents for the other two sites. Xerox classifies all these different documents according to their type and spend: commercial print; warehousing and distribution; central reprographics; print on demand; transaction printing; forms; and office output.

Likely document issues will be overstocks of certain documents that require storage and all the costs that come with it, multiple document users or owners, and a myriad of different suppliers associated with the production of every different document.

DAO counters the issues by offering customers control in the form of a sole point of contact for all documents, and all supplier liaison. It ensures consistency in the organisation’s documents, ensures that branding guidelines are maintained in every extremity of the organisation, and gives the customer information on document spend regularly or on request to enable close monitoring and management. DAO also offers better cost efficiency than the organisation can itself, and allows customer personnel to concentrate on their core business.

Finally, DAO helps the organisation in the long run by reducing the time-to-market of critical business documents, boosting brand image, and reducing the need for document storage facilities by facilitating print on demand.

3/7 eprintsourcing (XEPS)
XEPS tackles the issues caused when an organisation outsources work to multiple external print companies, but without any method of organisation-wide control or management. Research through its existing European customer base has proved that organisations can spend at least 5 per cent of turnover on external print jobs. This includes not only the cost of the physical printing itself, but also the personnel time and administration involved in finding the right supplier, of finding the cheapest supplier, and managing them through the job.

An organisation reaps a number of benefits when it uses XEPS. For the individual managing the job, XEPS will automatically:

• shortlist relevant suppliers according to the extent to which they match the brief, and the budget;
• provide an online method of managing the supplier and the job itself;
• facilitate the invoicing and payment process for that job.

For the organisation as a whole, XEPS ensures that:

• printing is consolidated across the business with only the most cost-effective, reliable, high-quality suppliers;
• organisational printing costs can be monitored and managed as a whole;
• the latest technologies are used automatically to expedite cost-effective printing wherever possible.

Overall, XEPS keeps personnel connected online to suppliers and Xerox printing experts at all times, and those same trained and experienced experts can be brought into the customer organisation to oversee and advise on particular jobs. It is flexible enough to be used for anything from complex direct mail or marketing and point of sale collateral, to company stationery such as compliments slips and business cards.

4/7 Document Production and Publishing (DPPS)
The basic task of print production and publishing, finishing, fulfilment and distribution of internal or customer-facing documents can prove costly, time-consuming, or both. In some cases, organisations may not even have the expertise in-house and therefore need to outsource anyway. Xerox Global Services’ DPPS solution caters to this need.

DPPS can expedite the processing of internal documents, external documents, or both. For internal documents such as memos, presentations, or reports, DPPS becomes an in-house print room. Requests for any internal documents are fulfilled by the print room for anyone within the organisation. For external documents e.g. a mobile phone manual for a phone manufacturer, DPPS can still produce the documents faster and more cost effectively than the organisation can itself; producing the right document in the right place at the right time. DPPS allows the organisation to concentrate on its core competencies without having to staff or manage a peripheral function such as printing. In addition, the customer organisation has the opportunity to access Xerox Global Services’ expertise in document printing and publishing, saving more money by reducing the size of its inventory (and the accompanying physical storage space), reducing the lead time on document production, and feel reassured that corporate branding guidelines will be upheld across the business.

5/7 Transactional Document Production (TDP)
TDP’s key differentiation from other Xerox services is in the ‘transactional’ part of the description, though TDP covers not only the production of invoices, payroll, financial reports, statements, invoices, ‘accounts payable’, but also insurance policies, claims documents, utility bills, direct mail pieces and other one-to-one personalised customer communications. Via TDP, Xerox Global Services offers organisations a one-stop-shop managed service for the engineering, design, production, and presentation of any transactional document used in correspondence with customers, suppliers, or other parties. TDP is also flexible enough to accommodate template and branding changes at any time without the integrated, back-office part of the service requiring overhaul. In addition to automating transactional document processes, TDP can also be harnessed to drive e-mail dialogue with customers, create an online archive of transactional information, or interact with an organisation’s database of optional content in order to personalise communications to specific individuals.

6/7 Mailroom Services
The mailroom is one of the areas in an organisation where growing pains are felt most acutely. As an organisation grows, simple tasks such as mail outs, distribution of company reports, or even seasonal financial communications to personnel can become unwieldy. The mailroom is also an area where significant cost can be saved by the automation of administration.

When Xerox Global Services offers its mailroom service it assesses an organisation’s current and likely future demand on all mailroom facilities. Xerox mailroom services fall into three broad areas; firstly, the mailroom completes basic functions such as the delivery of incoming mail to pigeonholes or individual recipient’s desks, or the organisation of couriers to transport documents externally from the organisation. Secondly, the mailroom can deliver an electronic scan-to-mail service, where incoming hard copy communications are received, opened, and scanned into soft copy so they can be stored in a central repository or network. Individual recipients are notified when documents arrive and where on the network they can be found. Thirdly, the mailroom can perform as a production facility to the organisation. For example, the mailroom could receive documents printed by TDP (see 5/7 above), or with an organisation’s customer relationship management system, and deal with the mail-out of bank statements, credit card statements, or other documents in a speedy and cost effective automated process.

Regardless of the particular functionality chosen, the mailroom service is designed to be flexible and responsive, avoiding issues caused by unplanned or short notice print runs or mail outs.

7/7 Customer Communication Services (CCS)
CCS uses both the document heritage of Xerox overall and the technological developments of Xerox Global Services and Xerox Research Centre Europe to counter the issues faced by organisations attempting to correspond with customers on an individual basis. Despite the investment in customer relationship management, internet, and corporate branding, 58 per cent of business leaders believe their customer-focused documents need to be improved1. CCS is a suite of solutions that help the customer leverage the potential for personalised customer communications. The services include a thorough document and marketing assessment that takes into account the current organisation, infrastructure, and future plans, and delivers a recommendation for specific solutions that will help execute a successful customer communication strategy. In addition, a document workflow analysis can help the organisation to deliver the document more effectively to a diverse range of media, platforms and channels including printers, faxes, email, internet and mobile technology devices.

CCS can handle enormous quantities of customer data productively and turn transactional documents into powerful marketing tools, increasing response rates and lowering costs per lead. CCS reengineers the customer’s process, which Xerox can then manage using either Document Production and Publishing (DPPS) or Transactional Document Production (TDP) Services.

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1 Source: Document, People and Technology: A European Perspective 2002 MORI survey conducted on behalf of Xerox Global Services