Delivering World-class Mail

Print Action, May 2004 by Bolte, Clint

More on the floor

drupa will obviously be the key international print technology venue in 2004. It could also well serve as a critical opportunity to develop collaborations for some of these future global fulfillment partnerships. Paul Richard, senior project manager for CapStone Technologies, discussed his own 5-step system toward a lean fulfillment operation. These steps were sort, shine, set in order, standardize, and sustain. He said, "Dust or rust indicates a potential problem."

Tom Quinn, MFSA's newly appointed director of fulfillment services, in his presentation mentioned, "Ex military personnel with ordnance (warehousing & logistics) experience are excellent candidates for your expanding fulfillment operation." As a means of reinforcing positive benchmarking performance, Quinn suggested posting a notice for all employees to see, which would read Days since the last order error.

With this underlying theme of improved customer service by means of collaboration it was not insignificant that Sue Reif, NAPL's director of pofessional development, was in attendance at this conference. NAPL's Printer Panel has noticed a strong interest in mailing and fulfillment from printer responses to its quarterly surveys for expanding into the additional value-added services.

With printers being among MFSA members' key clients, this printer trend is clearly of interest to MFSA. MFSA has 650 members including lettershops, mailhouses, fulfillment entities, direct-mail agencies, list brokers, and presort companies. While there are very few predominant printers, who are members, this is a market and industry, which they expect to pursue more aggressively.

MFSA and NAPL have had on-going discussions amongst their staff to determine how they might work together for the benefit of both their memberships. David Weaver, MFSA president, indicated that preliminary conversations between the two organizations were focusing on joint webcast topics, cross promotion of each other's publications, and select joint conferences.

Reif herself has been one of the operational stalwarts in planning and executing the most successful sheetfed conference for the past decade, which is the most obvious successful collaboration between NAPL and the Graphic Arts Technical Foundation. She feels that many lessons learned from that effort might be directed toward a joint fulfillment conference. Jim Schultz, a past NAPL chairman, current NAPLboard member, and long-time MFSA member, commented, "A MFSA-NAPL cooperation will lead to the best practices being implemented. MFSA is clearly the expert in mailing and fulfillment. NAPL is recognized for its financial acumen and print operational benchmarking."