Mail Management as a Gateway to Improving Many Business Processes: Part Two

In this post, Part Two of my series, I’ll provide a detailed look at the mail management solution we implemented for a major healthcare provider. Our goal was to enable the organization to focus more time and resources on providing state-of-the-art industry leading patient care and health insurance services. The first challenge was to improve the disparate mail management system that distributed mail throughout the enterprise. The healthcare organization had numerous separate mail room operations managed by multiple resources within its hospital network. Because these centers operated separately, an unacceptable number of mail pieces were either lost or not delivered in a timely fashion. The lack of coordination also meant that mail transport and staff costs were higher and operational efficiency lower than desired.

Our team consolidated the disparate mail rooms within the hospital network into a centralized “hub and spoke” model. In the new operation, all mail was received and distributed from one location. Cost savings from the new mail program totaled $1 million in the first year. By year two, we also assumed management of the healthcare provider’s complete transportation logistics program, which at the time we took over, included 16 different courier companies transporting biopharmaceutical and related items within the hospital network. The Canon team consolidated this program into one centralized courier operation that comprised 55 vehicles making over 2,000 stops daily. Cost savings from the revamped transportation logistics program were $700,000 in the first twelve months.

The next challenge was to implement a comprehensive production mail solution, which automates the production and mailing of customer statements for the health plan division. The mail processing system, which handles about 1.5 million statements per month, feeds and merges mail statement enclosures; folds and inserts the collated documents into an envelope and seals, addresses and transports the mail piece for processing by USPS. The system’s tracking technology improves job control and integrity as well as end-to-end quality assurance. This includes preventing errors such as mailing a document set that has missing pages, diverting jammed mail pieces out of the mailstream and inserting mail pieces that include Protected Health Information from several different clients into a document set.

In my next post I’ll spotlight how, based on our success with these solutions, the healthcare provider engaged Canon to provide additional mail and document management services. In the meantime, feel free to visit the Mail Services page of our website for information on industry trends, best practices and more.