panintelligence Communisis PLC Case Study

Transcription

1 panintelligence Communisis PLC Case Study Communisis plc Unleashing the power of data with the panintelligence dashboard We wanted to put the power in the hands of the users, and this is exactly what we did with panintelligence Nic Sheen, CTO, Communisis PLC Because life happens in real time

2 panintelligence Communisis PLC Case Study 2 Communisis PLC is one of the UK s leading outsourcing companies for marketing services. The profitable business is expanding and is currently on target to exceed last year s turnover of 208m. Communisis focus on delivering intelligence driven communications by working with their customers data to identify and target audiences with tailored messages. They have an impressive client list across multiple business sectors including utilities, insurance and finance, banks, and supermarket chains. Communisis s products cover everything from marketing, compliance and a variety of customer service messages including statements, ings, invoicing, direct mailing and billing. Reporting on millions of printed items is not only a necessity, it is vital in order for them to monitor compliance against their Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with individual clients. Recently Communisis implemented the panintelligence dashboard for timely and accurate online reporting which facilitated massive efficiency improvements and saved them a substantial amount of money in the process. by Vibeke Ulmann

3 panintelligence Communisis PLC Case Study 3 In all likelihood nearly every household in the UK will have received at least one of Communisis s products in the mail. Your supermarket loyalty card statement and vouchers, your bank account statement, your cheque book, your utility or phone bill and your insurance documents are quite likely to have been printed and mailed by Communisis on behalf of one of their customers. Most of the organisations that outsource their marketing and print jobs to Communisis have millions of customers, so the quantity of documents that Communisis process on a daily basis is massive and the reporting requirements are very challenging. Tim Mason, Head of Management Information at Communisis, explains, Communisis is one of Europe s biggest print companies, but we re looking at a future where much more of the business is electronically based, even the marketing related business. We re investigating new profitable areas such as electronic fulfilment services, SMS messages to mobiles, and a lot more besides. Print still accounts for a very large part of our business, as our customers outsource their print and marketing management to us, including their brand management. We operate with client services teams of 5-6 people who physically sit in our customers offices so they can handle their print and marketing requirements in close collaboration with the client s own teams. Communisis employs around 1,500 people and the company has been growing fast over the past few years, mostly through acquisition. In the first half of 2012 alone the company acquired three companies, one of which is a software development company based in Bangalore, India. Tim continues All of our contracts operate with SLAs and because the volumes are so huge, there is an enormous daily reporting exercise. Traditionally we worked with massive spreadsheets containing 10 to 50 worksheets, and had people spending several man days per month just getting the reporting done and consolidated. In short, reporting was a spreadsheet nightmare. We also use Crystal Reports, but the problem with Crystal is that whilst the reports give you a picture of what has happened, and what might have gone wrong, there is no interactivity Monitoring levels of asset usage on a customer s copy of the Communisis Digital Asset Management system Tim explained We wanted a tool which was easy to use, provided customers with insight, and at a glance showed them how we were performing against our contracted SLAs. Tim Mason, Head of Management Information

4 panintelligence Communisis PLC Case Study 4 and everything is bespoke for that particular client, so they are not re-usable for anyone else. One of the UK s largest utility companies, with an estimated customer base exceeding 14 million, is a Communisis customer. They have three divisions split into Residential, Business and Services, the latter covering servicing of equipment and various financial products (such as equipment insurance). The client approached Communisis to discuss moving to an online web-based reporting solution. Tim explained We wanted a tool which was easy to use, provided customers with insight, and at a glance showed them how we were performing against our contracted SLAs. We had a demonstration of the panintelligence dashboard, and because we know how to work with massive amounts of data, we asked lots and lots of questions. Mostly the data is simple in structure, and because it s all derived from relational databases, it is easy to get hold of. However, we have very strict requirements when it comes to data protection and we needed to be absolutely sure that there would be water tight shutters between the data originating from different customers. The panintelligence team was able to demonstrate they could meet all the requirements we had, and there is no better way of saying it other than we immediately fell in love with the panintelligence dashboard and decided there and then that this was the tool we needed. Quick process from implementation to go live Paddy Lemons is the Communisis Business Analyst who works with the client services team at the utility company in question. He was tasked with developing the online dashboard solution for the customer. Paddy explains the process, The client sends fairly large batch files overnight. The data is then used to do all the document composition, printing them, sticking them into envelopes and handing them over to Royal Mail. For this utility customer alone we re talking about roughly 110 million items per year, so we probably peak at a daily output of 500,000 packs with an average around 400,000. That s an awful lot of paper and postage, so no wonder the client is pushing their customers to Monitoring levels of user activity on a customer s copy of the Communisis Digital Asset Management system. The panintelligence team was able to demonstrate they could meet all the requirements we had, and there is no better way of saying it other than we immediately fell in love with the panintelligence dashboard and decided there and then that this was the tool we needed. Tim Mason, Head of Management Information

5 panintelligence Communisis PLC Case Study 5 move to e-billing. The postage spend alone is around 75% of the cost of each pack. We decided to develop some views in the dashboard as a small proof of concept. We then showed them to the customer, demonstrating the drill through facility to the underlying data. Based on that we got the go ahead for the development of more comprehensive views and I locked myself in a room for a couple of days and just tried to work through the requirements that the client service team were producing. Essentially we wanted to provide a representation of the data which we previously provided in the spreadsheet reports. But we also wanted to be able to provide straight through daily analytics, and we wanted it all to be accessible through panintelligence. The entire process was incredibly fast something I attribute to how easy it is to work with panintelligence. I started working on the views on the 16th July 2012, we soft launched on 1st August 2012, and by November the solution was in full operation. The main focus on a daily basis is the number of inputs we receive, what we produce, and what we send out. But it needs to be broken down into business area - Residential, Business, and Services, where Residential obviously vastly outnumbers the other two. As they re effectively different businesses they re also managed differently and therefore have different reporting requirements. Although the data types are largely similar, they re coming from different databases and they also work with different Priority categories. i.e. Priority 1 goes out the same day, Priority 2 goes out the following day as second class mail. Paddy continues We also have other intakes for example, things which need to go out via , or manual items which need to go into the envelope together with a bill. In a perfect world everything would get processed, but unfortunately we live in an imperfect world and there are a number of items called Return to Desk which cannot be processed for various reasons. The Return to Desk figure is important to track and analyse. If the reason an item cannot be processed was bad address or something attributable to the data we receive, it doesn t impact our SLA. If, on the other hand, we have an OCR mail machine which has a Identifying the most frequent downloaders of assets from the Digital Asset Management system. Looking at the efficiency improvements and cost saving within Communisis, Paddy estimates that the introduction of the dashboard has so far saved the organisation around 75k annually, repaying the initial outlay many times over.

6 panintelligence Communisis PLC Case Study 6 problem, the rejects would most likely translate into credit points to the customer. So a drill down into the rejects to analyse the causes is very useful and can save money. It used to take around 2 weeks for the customer services team to be able to collate this information and do something with it, making it semi-presentable and draw some conclusions, whereas now it takes me less than 2 minutes to find what I need to see and draw conclusions. Speed, more than anything, is what we have gained with panintelligence, and that really is the key! It is great to be able to make some comparisons and draw conclusions and take actions there and then, and going through this with the client services team has made it much easier for them, whereas previously they were seriously struggling with the old spreadsheet reports. Another thing the dashboard does really well is flag up issues. At a glance I can see a spike in suppressed letters, but if there has been no change in the overall intake of letters, why is there a spike? Something must be wrong and I can immediately investigate what is going on. We show anomalies, and then we rely on our customer services teams to collaborate with the client to prompt an action. panintelligence gives us a way to be proactive in identifying issues, which has done away with the criticism we sometimes had in the past that the client services team was not fast enough in identifying issues. Previously they spent the majority of their time filling in hundreds of reports, whereas now they can spend the time analysing the data, which is infinitely more valuable for us and the customer. Three hours of work in the morning has been reduced to 10 minutes looking for spikes. We know that this is driving savings and efficiency improvements on the customer side as well. There are a number of drivers they look at. On a short term basis the mail correspondence drives the utility company s call centre traffic and spikes greatly influence how they staff and resource the call centres. If there is a spike in the number of bills, for example an extra 30,000 today, we can predict there will be approximately 3,000 additional calls the following day. As 95% of their call centre operation is incoming calls, we can now flag it up in advance, Paddy says. The MI presentation pattern that Communisis typically uses: a stacked bar chart giving a 12-month summary; drilling down to a pie chart which gives a month s view for the month the user clicked on; drilling further down to the underlying data. The entire process was incredibly fast something I attribute to how easy it is to work with panintelligence. I started working on the views on the 16th July 2012, we soft launched on 1st August 2012, and by November the solution was in full operation. Paddy Lemons, Business Analyst

7 panintelligence Communisis PLC Case Study 7 Looking at the efficiency improvements and cost saving within Communisis, Paddy estimates that the introduction of the dashboard has so far saved the organisation around 75k annually, repaying the initial outlay many times over. Tim concurs, We ve not laid people off, but rather freed them up so that they can now spend their time analysing the data and being proactive in solving problems, there and then, in collaboration with the customer. These activities are much more valuable to the customer and to Communisis. Growing the applications and the users Currently the utility company has around twenty users who log into the panintelligence dashboard through the Communisis website, but that is about to change. Tim picks up the story. We have four fairly big pieces of development work in the pipeline for the customer. Basically we need to replicate the views we ve done with the transactional mail processing for processing. There will also be additional information, such as when an was opened, along with reports on soft and hard bounces. We will also need URL click reports through to the website, and the online payment facility for bills. Monitoring the various categories of intake data received from the client organisation which is used to drive electronic and postal communications to customers. Volumes are split by the client s business divisions. The B2B division of the utility company has asked to be treated as a completely separate entity with their own branding. Therefore, we need to split out all their data and create views according to their particular requirements. We need more detailed reporting on the intake of letters that produce the print jobs. Files now relate to hundreds of different types of letter which makes no difference to the printer but we need to be able to break reports down into letter types e.g. debt letters, as opposed to a welcome letter or an acquisition letter. The advantage is that they should be able to utilise their resource much better as a result of the insight they Speed, more than anything, is what we have gained with panintelligence, and that really is the key! Paddy Lemons. Business Analyst

8 panintelligence Communisis PLC Case Study T+44 (0) gain. It would be nice to put a value on how much this will mean for the customer, in terms of savings and efficiency improvements, but we can t estimate it until the application is up and running. Finally, there are the new Energy Efficiency Assessment requirements which will come into force next year. This will need to be treated as an entirely different business stream and will also need its own reports. The above could mean another fifty dashboard users for this one customer alone, and we aim to have all of it in place by the end of March 2013, Tim says with a smile. Future clients and applications But Communisis is by no means stopping there. Currently the company is in the test phase with a dashboard reporting solution for one of the UK s largest financial institutions. This client is also a user of Communisis s own Digital Asset Management Software and they manage thousands of digital documents on their behalf. As an example, if there is a rate change, the financial institution need to issue new documents to all of their customers announcing the changes and withdrawing all the old documents. It s a huge job each time and it has to be correct given the scrutiny and the regulations within the financial sector. The panintelligence dashboard for the financial institution client is due to go into production before the end of Other clients are already lining up, including a multinational manufacturer of products including personal care, household cleaning, laundry detergents, prescription drugs and disposable nappies. In addition one of the UK s largest water companies has already asked for a dashboard solution as well. Beyond that, there are plans to develop an in-house Communisis MI dashboard for the management team and an MI suite for the technical support team. Communisis would also like to embed the dashboard solution into their own software offerings such as Connect (ecommerce) and IQ (online print quote solution). Communisis have already started a discussion about acquiring an Enterprise licence from panintelligence in order to have complete freedom over deployment to both internal and external stakeholders. Analysing volumes, trends and quality issues in the intake data. Three hours of work in the morning has been reduced to 10 minutes looking for spikes. Paddy Lemons, Business Analyst