Hi, I'm Dave Zamorski, COO of Associates International.  We recently won the CIPPI Award in 2010 for the biggest improvement in process management and customer responsiveness.  What that really means to the company is how do we get more jobs through the shop with less touches and how do we record the cost effectiveness of it.  With that in mind, there was a lot of things that we learned on this.  One you have to have a very strong relationship with your partners.  We partnered with Creo and we partnered with Avonti and Xerox on the process.  Really Avonti and Creo generated the GDF extensions that we had written and it captured all the costs and they go right back into the MIS system.  What that means to the company is that there’s no people touching those jobs when they come off the presses, there's no accounting needed for it; it's already in the system.  And we have true cost in every one of those jobs.

We handle hundreds of line items a day that come through the storefronts.  To sit there and manually go back through and try to touch each one of those and record those was very expensive.  This saved us annually some place in the arena of $150,000 to $180,000 in just recording cost, touches, and being able to capture those costs.

One of the many things that I see as the takeaway from what we just experienced with the Sippy Awards and with the improvement in our process that we, one, we increased our productivity by an astounding over 75 percent.  Actually our payroll went down an astounding 30 percent and our profitability went up.  It also led to where our customer as they're quoted in a case study saved over $500,000 annually in their process improvements by eliminating those touches.  

It's a great takeaway, it's a great source to take to your customers and to go sell to your customers, that they can save money as well as you can.  It all equates to faster productivity, it's back on the street faster for them and it also is at an improved price for them, which is two good pluses.