Outsourcing Print and Marketing Services facility

Situation

Our client is one of the UK's leading general insurers. It employs more than 4,000 UK staff and has annual revenues in excess of £1.5bn. They offer customers a wide range of commercial and personal insurance products both in its own name and via its other well-known brands. Our client has a large network of branches and divisional centres throughout the country.

Our client's Board came to the conclusion that its in-house Print and Marketing Services Division (PMSD) was:

• Business-critical for every function/brand
• Significantly underutilised following sale of a major subsidiary
• Falling behind important technological advances

As a non-core activity, their Procurement Team was mandated to go out into the market to identify the optimum long-term outsource partner.

Objective

Key objectives included:

• Protect rights/interests of PMSD personnel, many with 20+ years’ service
• Retain valuable customer knowledge
• No interruption to service
• Deliver ambitious cost savings
• Deliver rapid and sustainable quality/service improvements through fast-tracked innovation and up-skilling of staff

Selection

Our client undertook a comprehensive tender-based selection process over a 12 month period, which involved many of the world’s biggest names in print and document management.

“Over the course of the selection process it became clear Banner Managed Communication had something special which sets them apart from the crowd, and which I feel boils down to a combination of their passion, commitment and exceptional culture. So as well as ticking all the right boxes at a purely practical level, this is a company we know we’re really going to enjoy doing business with.” Mike Delany, Management Services Manager, 

Results

Financial

An ambitious target of £1.7m in direct operational savings was set but, suspecting that might be unrealistic, a £1.3m was guaranteed. However, all expectations were exceeded – in the first full year when the project achieved £1.85m in savings – 42% above target. Furthermore, a host of spin-off initiatives generated additional savings: e.g. a review of postal practices saved another £0.5m.

Quality

The sheer scope of the services outsourced through this project made it the most radical internal change programme ever undertaken by our client. A formal 23-point SLA was employed to measure success. Based on these, we’ve achieved 100% success on 21/23 measures (the remaining two being within acceptable tolerance). 

Impact on client brands

Clear benefits were realised to the core client brands serviced by the new Print and Marketing Services set-up:

• Claims handling time reduced by 48 hours
• One Direct division doubled market share
• Another reduced spend by 42%
• 30% increase in facility usage

Staff

• There were no compulsory redundancies
• 94.4% staff retention was achieved
• We delivered a comprehensive retraining / up-skilling program for the 38 staff
• 15 new jobs were created and filled locally

Extension of services

Additional services implemented to date include:

• Data capture
• Post room management
• Scanning
• Digital archiving
• Creative services team
• Multi-channel communications

This offers ultimate proof of the speed and extent to which a major restructuring project can be embraced and seamlessly integrated into a third party provider - in this instance Banner Managed Communication.