So What Really Is Business Process Automation?

You may start to hear the term "Business Process Automation" circulating - So what is it exactly?

Gartner defines it as "the automation of complex business processes and functions beyond conventional data manipulation and record-keeping activities, usually through the use of advanced technologies." 

Really, the goal of most business software is to take tedious processes and convert them into a push-button workflow that takes the manual out of manual labor. Because logging into a website to approve some invoices instead of Jim chasing after you every afternoon for a signature sounds a little easier... on everyone. 

So you have a lot of paper, I mean a lot of paper, and some days sorting and organizing that paper has the potential to turn your brain to mush. But what if we could implement a process that begins with a few steps at the copier and ends
in a nice convenient digital file cabinet that contains all the business process workflow for each document?

For instance, your job is to take your stack of paper, review each sheet, sort them into the appropriate stacks, have each of the four managers approve their stack in a timely (and I stress timely) fashion, then be able to track down those invoices, new hire packets or expense reports (whatever makes up your "stack of paper") at any given moment.  You might have a tear running down your cheek right now as you imagine yourself in the file room with drawers of file cabinets ripped open and you sprawled out on the floor going through yellow folder after yellow folder (who decided on that shade of yellow anyway?) looking for that one page, only to be interrupted 50 times for things that are possibly more important but that must take a back seat until you can find that one... wait... there it is!

If this sounds familiar, I think we can help...well I know we can help. Business Process Automation isn't just a new trendy term, it is in fact real and we know all about it.  So wipe those tears away and let us know when you are ready to make it a reality. We are here waiting!

Join us in Vancouver, Washington at the Hilton on October 15, 2015 to learn more from our experts! Register now at www.ctx-xerox.com/tech.html

The Xerox® Versant™ 2100

We are excited to announce the new 

Xerox® Versant™ 2100!

The Xerox® Versant™ 2100 is a revolutionary new product that gives you the amazing color control and automation tools found on the Xerox 800 and 1000 but with a modular design that allows a much smaller footprint.

The Xerox® Versant™ 2100 Press can help streamline your operation and make you more competitive and indispensable in a number of ways:

• Less waste—print in exact quantities
• Less downtime—Xerox® Connect Advantage means more press availability
• Improved efficiency—fewer steps and less operator intervention
• Reduced turnaround times—less trial and error means jobs are produced and in your customers’ hands more quickly
• Automated workflow—reduced labor costs and more accurate output

Automation is key!

When you tap into this burgeoning demand for short runs, quick turnarounds and personalized print, and have the hundreds of jobs you need to print in a day to get a return on your investment, the sobering truth can settle in.  Fifty to 100 or more jobs in a day simply can’t be produced using the same processes and equipment as in the past.

The Xerox® Versant™ 2100 Press brings together automation from beginning to end to make it possible—and productive—to produce the greater number of smaller jobs that now characterize the print marketplace.

• Automation that makes job setup faster
• Automation that makes it easier to get outstanding, consistent color
• Automation that opens up new areas of finishing versatility

For a demonstration of the new addition to the Xerox product line, let us know:

Oregon and SW Washington - CTX

Greater Washington - QBSI

From The New Hire Perspective

“I had an amazing opportunity in getting this job right after college, and I think that speaks a lot about the company in general.  Within these doors, there’s such a unique environment, a mix of tenured folks, who really bring so much knowledge and experience to the table, and the fresh faces, eager to start and flourish in their professional lives.  Instead of there being any sort of hierarchy or selfishness, what really stood out to me the most was how much these experienced reps wanted to help out.  The biggest emphasis in their advice was the importance of relationships and that people buy from people. After being here for a year and a half, that’s exactly how I look at it.

If the bottom line for any sales position isn’t to help people out, you won’t be successful. As most would agree, I think the world of “sales” comes with a certain stigma and that’s something that can’t really be avoided.  But what I have noticed is the people that are the most successful and tenured became that way because they were able to create those relationships and trust with these companies.  If I ever lost my vision in that, I’d walk away.  What I enjoy the most about being a part of CTX and the entire Northwest Group is that they created an environment where I felt that anything less was unacceptable.”

We are always looking for energetic, positive and outstanding individuals to join our team!

Click here to view available job opportunities in our Portland, Eugene, Corvallis, Boise, Pocatello, Redmond, Auburn, Yakima and Kennewick offices!

Stories from the Field

“Great customer service.” What does that phrase mean to you? I hear it nearly every day, and yet I wonder how different people interpret this concept. A wholly intangible idea, this can be difficult to define.

For our customers, the experience begins as soon as they pick up the phone to contact us. While our Field Service Technicians are the face of a customer’s experience with the Northwest Group (CTX and QBSI), our Dispatchers in the Customer Care Center are the voice. If a customer experiences long hold times, unclear communication, or the feeling their concerns are not being addressed, then an opportunity to provide great customer service has already been missed. However, if a customer has a prompt, concise and attentive conversation when calling the Northwest Group, the tone has been set for a great overall experience. But great customer service doesn’t end there.

As important as effective communication is to our Customer Call Center, it is equally imperative to our Service Department. At the Northwest Group, we ask that all of our technicians contact our customers within one hour of receiving their service call to provide an estimated time of arrival. This allows a customer to understand where they fall in our technician’s schedule. Since not all copier repairs go as expected, not every ETA can be achieved, which is why follow-up communication is absolutely critical. If a technician knows they cannot meet an ETA, it is of the utmost importance that they communicate with their customer to update them as soon as possible. Additionally, if a machine is in need of parts that must be ordered from our manufacturers, and the part arrival is delayed, step one is to contact our customer to update them of the situation, and offer alternative solutions, if possible. 

What does this all mean? Communication is the key!

So, what does great customer service mean to me? That our customers immediately know the expectations, are communicated with if there is any delay, and what the plan is if there are any hurdles that our Service Department needs to overcome. Now that’s great customer service.

Jim Wadsworth 

Field Service Manager

www.ctx-xerox.com

www.qbsi-xerox.com

Knowing is Half the Battle

I’m a kid of the ‘80s.

I left my Flock of Seagulls hair in 1984. I left my mullet in 1985. I then left my Bon Jovi locks behind in 1986. Don’t ask me about my Living Color shaved head/dreadlocks from 1988 to 1990. I have successfully “misplaced” the remaining pictures/evidence of that fiasco. When it comes to hair, I learned what not to do in the ‘80s.

However, one thing that I still haven’t moved on from is G.I. Joe. No, I don’t have action figures throughout my office (nor at home). I still subscribe to their tagline, “Knowing is half the battle.” I am a firm believer of “I don’t know what I don’t know”, so when something comes along that causes me to shift my thinking – a paradigm shift – I am open to it. I don’t assume I know everything about even the very industry I specialize in – Managed Print Services.

This open thinking has allowed us at CTX to move into areas we previously have not offered service. At first, we only serviced HP, Xerox, and Kyocera printers but over time, we created a business model that allowed us to take on virtually every make and every model of desktop laser printers. This has opened up so many doors for us. We found a way to meet a need in the market – manage any laser printer out there because our potential customers may have ANY laser printer out there. And we haven’t stopped adjusting our business model as needed.

Now let me turn this back on you and your organization. How much do you know about your energy cost in kilowatt hours? Maybe you don’t know personally, but I am positive you or someone in your organization can look that up easily or call someone at PGE (or some other provider) and find out. Knowing this number gives you opportunities to make smart business decisions around that number.

Can you negotiate it down with your current vendor? Are there better opportunities through other service providers to negotiate that number down? Are there new or emerging competitors that offer different services that can provide the same end result (or better)?

Can you communicate the need to reduce energy consumption to your employees? If you were to create an incentive to do so, how much money could you budget to award employees while still maintaining a net reduction in expenses?

Are you able to pinpoint where your energy goes? If so, can you isolate the “worst offenders” and change business practices and habits so that these offenders use less energy? Are there other assets that could replace these “energy hogs” that will create an attractive ROI?

OK, maybe knowing in this case isn’t “half” the battle – it’s more like 10%. As you can see, there is more work to be done after you are in the know. I gave you an easy example. Oregon (and nearly every other state) has initiatives and incentives revolving around energy. There are rebate programs for putting your company’s personal computers on a power management program (please see me if you have any questions – we have a great solution around this). Let’s move on to one area I’m positive into which you have little visibility – printing.

How much do you spend on generating a single page document?

Don’t know? Well, you really should. I can say that because I have seen through my work that knowing this number has allowed companies large and small to reduce their real expenses around printing in a manner similar to reducing their expenses around energy.

Maybe you think that you could do some simple math to determine your cost per print. You know that Staples charges $149.99 per toner and the manufacturer boasts an output of 6,000 pages for that toner. That seems to work out to $0.025 (rounded) per page. Now, as you walk through the office and you see a stack of papers go uncollected on the printer, you know that is approximately $1.45 (for example) wasted. Multiply that out for a year and that number grows. Are you beginning to see the direction I’m going here? This is a great place to START, but don’t stop there.

How much did the printer cost? How old is it? How much……wait.

I’ll save you the many more questions you should be asking. $0.025 is only the tip of the iceberg for calculating your cost per print.

I highly encourage you to request an assessment from CTX (Oregon and SW Washington) or QBSI (Washington). We specialize in working with your administration and IT staff to determine your true cost per print. Once you know that….well, that’s half the battle. What you do with it at that point is up to you. You can continue to watch money sit wasted on the printer or you can take the next step.

What is that step? Well, we can help with that too. Give us a call today.

Daniel Alexander has been the Director of Managed Print Services for CTX since 2010. He has personally helped hundreds of businesses get their arms around what is known in the industry as one of the last unaudited expenses – print management. He can be reached directly at 503-968-0365.

The Great Command Workstation

In the last 13 years, I have held a variety of positions within our company, from sales to technical analyst, to trainer to now the Marketing Director.  In every one of my jobs, there was always one tool that I would use on a regular basis and that is Command Workstation.

EFI’s Command Workstation is software that can be loaded on any computer, in my case Mac OS10.  It is a direct interface to the Fiery print controller, basically the brain of your production/light production device.  It allows you to do so many things to ease your day, here are a few:

1.)   View the Status of your jobs: There are two areas within the main screen of Command Workstation that show the progress of your job.  Whether it is still processing or it is printing 100 of a 500-page job, all this information is at your fingertips.  In my case, this is especially helpful because I sit about three rooms away from the actual device so instead of having to get up every 5 minutes or better yet, sit and stare at the device, I can just simply open the Command Workstation window to verify my job is running and what copy number it is on.  This is one of the most helpful tools in maintaining a productive working day when I have to print on demand.

2.)   Reprint a Job: With a normal multifunctional device, once your job is printed, it is gone forever unless you specifically chose to save it in a mailbox on the hard drive.  In my job, I frequently proof items to make sure that everything is correct in the document before doing a final print.  With Command Workstation and my Fiery, my jobs are always stored for reprint. Therefore, I can send a job, once again from my desk three rooms away, and when I arrive at the printer, if my proof looks great, I can release 10, 100, 1000 more right there instead of going back to my computer.  This is once again a huge benefit in keeping my day productive and efficient.

3.)   Imposition:  Many of us have had to make booklets and getting those pages in the correct order when it is more then four can be quite confusing. It usually ends in manually taking blanks sheets, making a booklet, writing the number on each page, then deconstructing the booklet to see what page lands where.  Within Command Workstation and the print driver at your desk, you can send a single page document to print and simply choose “booklet layout – left binding” and boom, the 10 manual steps you previously did are gone, just like that!

Although there are so many features to help with workflow, imposition, and composition of documents within Command Workstation, these 3 simple but very important features are what I use on a daily basis.  With these 3 simple improvements in my workflow, the productivity of my day greatly increases so that I can continue to print on demand instead of outsourcing in bulk. This also results in saving a lot of money!

Do you have a fiery on your device and want to have all of this functionality at your fingertips? Visit EFI to download now! http://w3.efi.com/en/Fiery/Products/CWS5

Kristen

Northwest Group 

Director of Marketing

BLACK...It Really is a COLOR!

It may surprise you, but black is one of the hardest colors (shades) to match.

When printing in CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black), different values are needed to give "Black" a certain appearance on the page. For example, a 'Warm Black' would have more Red in it than other colors, or a 'Cool Black' would have more Cyan in the mix.

If you have a large object on a page and only use 100% K (Solid Black), it will appear dark grey rather than a deep black. This is due to the saturation level achievable by the ink or toner on the paper. If you are printing the page in full CMYK color, you can achieve a deeper, richer looking black by leveraging the use of the other CMY colors.

If you blend; C 50, M 30, Y 30 , K 100, you will achieve a 'deeper RICH black' that will be perceived as 'cooler' because it has more cyan in the mix.

If you blend; C 30, M 50, Y 30 , K 100, you will achieve a 'deeper RICH black' that will be perceived as 'warmer' because it has more magenta in the mix.

The term 'RICH' is used to enforce the notion that more colors were used to make black, so it's been enriched.  The term "solid black" refers to the color generated from the used on K "black only" ink or toner.

'Solid Black' is best used for text, lines and thin graphical elements, which help to maintain hard, crisp and clean edges. If you choose to use 'RICH' Black, any minor mis-registration within the printing process will make these objects appear soft edged, lacking clarity.

When using software within Microsoft's Office Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher) all color is defined in RGB (Red, Green, Blue), not CMYK. Black is defined with a value of R 0, G 0, B 0. The trouble with RGB is that it is a Display (Monitor) Color language, not a Print Color language like CMYK. If you want to print your file in black and white, you must select 'Grayscale' within your print driver for it to generate a black and white service click. If you let your Postscript print driver convert color for you, it will convert RGB Black to CMYK value of C 89, M 83, Y 78, K 100, which generates a color service click when 'Grayscale' is not manually selected.

Adobe Systems, Microsoft's leading software competitor, chooses to define Black within it's software (InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop) using the CMYK Color language, setting Black to K 100. So, when printing files which only using Adobe Black, a black and white service click, whether you select 'Grayscale' or not will always be generated.

MY FAVORITE BLACK FACTS
Today a pinch of Black Pepper is added to almost every type of recipe imaginable. Once used as currency and presented to the gods as a sacred offering, it is fortunate that this most popular of spices is now readily available throughout the world.

BLACK AS A SIGNATURE COLOR IN MUSIC:
Johnny Cash — This country music icon was referred to as “the man in black.”

QUOTES ABOUT BLACK:
“Without black, no color has any depth. But if you mix black with everything, suddenly there’s shadow – no, not just shadow, but fullness. You’ve got to be willing to mix black into your palette if you want to create something that’s real.” — Amy Grant

FAVORITE SONG WITH BLACK IN THE TITLE
Baby’s in Black by The Beatles

WHAT OWNING A BLACK CAR MEANS
There is no question that the vehicle you drive is an extension of your personality — According to the experts, the message you send by driving a Black vehicle is your empowered, not easily manipulated, love elegance, and appreciate classics.

TELL US WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT THE COLOR BLACK
Is there something you know about black, we’d love to hear from you. Share what you know about the color Black

by Brandon Gary
Director of Production Print
www.qbsi-xerox.com  

The Xerox Color Press 800 Improves The Way One University Works

As your business grows and your workflow changes Xerox has a product family that grows with you. From business color to light production to full production, we can cover every aspect of your production printing requirements. 

A major University in the Northwest that had been using a Xerox 700 Digital Press for 5 years recently implemented the Color Press 800 and that has in turn changed their entire workflow.  By embracing change, this customer was able to expand their production offering to their customers, thus allowing them to grow their volume from 45,000 per month to 173,000 per month in the first six months.  With the Color Press 800 they were able to:

·       Move 20% of their offset short run press work to the new machine

·       Print on Heavier stocks, up to 350 gsm

·       Print on a variety of textured stocks because of the unique way the machine fuses

Because of these important improvements, they are able to increase their offerings to their customer base.  The University was also able to adjust their pricing structure, allowing their clients to send work previously done in black in white to color at a minimal increase. 

The biggest result of the installation was the production time improvements. Because the speed of the Color Press 800 is 80 Pages-Per-Minute on all media types, They were able to decrease those production times to one-third what they experienced from the Xerox 700 Digital Press. For example, one job that used to take the University 6 hours to setup and print was cut down to 1.5 hours because of the efficiency and the speed they now have with the Color Press 800.  As the customer stated “the Color Press 800 is a different class of machine.  Xerox has a niche between the light production and IGEN/Indigo world and no one else has anything like it.” 

Shana Crook - Northwest Group Production Specialist
www.ctx-xerox.com

The World of Color

The world of color can be a very tricky one to maneuver, especially if you are new to it.  If you have been spending a lot of money on outsourcing all of your marketing jobs and feel like you have reached the point where some of those less intense jobs could be done in-house, here are some things to think about.

1.) How do you design for digital printing? Make sure your graphic designer or marketing coordinator knows how to design for digital printing. This involves knowing your brand colors, understanding crop marks and bleeds and how to optimize your printing device to get more bang for your buck.

2.) What are your brand's colors and how do you keep them consistent? Understand the difference between RGB, CMYK, and Pantone Colors. Getting your monitor to look like your output device can be a tricky and costly for that matter but at least understanding why it doesn't can be very beneficial when designing as well.

3.) What is text, bond, cover, tag, and index? Paper! The world of paper can be quite confusing at first but once you figure out your top paper types for your jobs and where to get them, you will be in full swing.

4.) How will you print your jobs? Finding the right machine that will not only fit in your environment now but also grow with you as you get the hang of things and start bringing more jobs in-house is imperative.  Most digital presses are around for 3 to 5 years so make sure the one you get is the one that will fit with your company in 3 to 5 years.

5.) What is Finishing and Color Management? Finishing is basically printing lingo for finishing your document i.e. saddle-stitching, booklet fold, tri-fold etc.  Choosing whether it is more cost-effective to do this inline, offline or outsourcing is important to think about. It may be cost-effective to do offline but if it requires 4 hours of your employees time to do it, it may be better to outsource.  What about Color Management? Is the digital press that you bring in going to have some method of managing color, calibrating or creating profiles, or do you think that a normal business color machines is sufficient for your needs?

All of these items are important to think about when contemplating bringing jobs in-house but with the Northwest Group(QBSI, CTX, Pinnell) on your side we can help you maneuver through this so that you come out on the other side with all the information you need. Let us know!