Corporate Express Document & Print Management, Inc.

Paperless Workflow Streamlines Document and Print Management for the Premedia Service Group of Corporate Express Document & Print Management

Corporate Express' Document & Print Management (CEDPM) division is a leading provider of comprehensive document management, and forms, label and direct mail print solutions. With eight manufacturing plants, a centralized Premedia Service Group and more than 50 sales offices, CEDPM's online ordering, print management programs and customized solutions help Fortune 1000 companies reduce hard costs and improve internal processes.

The Premedia Service Group of CEDPM-located in Lenexa, Kansas has put its expertise to work in its own business with the help of MetaCommunications. The group was looking for a way to streamline its order entry process, eliminating inefficient paper-based processes by implementing a digital workflow. Marianne Curtis, Graphic Artist, was with the Premedia Service Group when this project was initially undertaken. She says, "Not only were we interested in implementing a paperless order entry workflow, but we were also expecting to gain the ability to better track jobs through our process, including the amount of billable time spent on each as well as its status in the queue."

The Premedia Service Group receives orders from the company's sales team for production in its form, label and direct mail plants. Curtis says, "When an order comes in, we receive the artwork and prepare it for production in one of our plants, sending the plant the digital plates for use on press. Each job has, at a minimum, a job number and form number associated with it, and can consist of as many as three to four sub-tickets as it works its way through the order entry, preflight, proof-and-review, alteration and final production processes. With our previous paper-based process, each time a job came into the shop it was treated as a new job, even if it was a reprint of an earlier project or an iteration of an active project. This resulted in a lot of unnecessary rework since there wasn't easy access to historical information." In addition to its premedia work, group members were also fielding a large number of calls from internal customers asking about job status, which took time to track down.

Workgroups has made our lives around here much easier, improved the quality of customer service we deliver, and saved us a significant amount of time and rework.
Marianne Curtis, Graphic Artist

Curtis came to the group with expertise in process management and data collection, and applied that expertise to their implementation of MetaCommunications' Job Manager and Virtual Ticket. The Job Manager database was populated with information about the group's internal customers — its sales force and plants — including billing information. "In Virtual Ticket," says Curtis, "we created a custom job ticket that exactly met our needs. Not only did we need to track each job from the perspective of the sales rep or plant that sent it in, we also wanted to track who the end client was. That enabled us to begin to build a thorough history that allowed us to not only easily recognize jobs that were back for another step in the process or for reprinting, but also to determine at a glance what the key preferences of the end client were. Now we know exactly who worked on a given job, what we have done, how many times it has been in and for what — in other words, we have a much better understanding of the job and are able to process it much more efficiently."

Curtis continues, "We have found a multitude of uses for Workgroups. It has made our lives around here much easier, improved the quality of customer service we deliver, and saved us a significant amount of time and rework."

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