One of the few growth spots in the mail industry are managed service providers who focus solely on helping you manage your mailing equipment and postage spends to find cost savings, eliminate fees and recover overpayments and lost postage funds. With the dramatic postage changes happening, these firms are uniquely positioned to know where to bring money back to your organization and should be considered.
There are Managed Service Providers (MSPs) for every spend category and different business areas. Some that you may be familiar with are freight/supply chain, information technology, contracts and vendor management (Telephone, print, utility).
Challenges of Managing Fleet Mailing Assets:
- Multiple postage accounts to fund and maintain
- Unclear invoices – Unclear contract expiry dates
- No control over rogue spend
- Mailing spend is a low priority – Lack of resources
- Difficult to assess needs or requirements for each location
- No published pricing for comparison or benchmarking
- Poor visibility – Challenge getting information for all locations
- No centralized oversight
- Inconsistent pricing for similar equipment across the fleet
Benefits of a Managed Service Provider:
- Time Savings – Handle time consuming and repetitive administrative work
- Insight and Visibility – Provide a thorough spend analysis while you still maintain control and responsibility
- Expertise – Knowledge and experience in the specific category that will allow for greater accuracy and detail
- Best-in-Class Tools – Complete visibility to spend using the most innovative tools, resources available and ongoing support
- Allows you to focus on bottom line growth and profit
Mail Audit and Recovery is a category that should be explored because this spend is often overlooked and the potential savings can be large. In this area, these firms typically will not charge for their services but will only share in a piece of the documented savings or recovery. This gain share model is great for many companies because there is no risk. If they do not find any savings, the services are free.
Main Areas They Explore To Find Savings:
- Mail Equipment Savings – Analyze what you have across the enterprise
- Eliminate Avoidable Fees
- Identify Overpayments
- Recover Lost Postage
How To Select The Right Managed Service Provider:
- Look for their experience in the industry
- Documented Client Successes – Referrals and testimonials
- On-going Maintenance – Understand how they can help you maintain your equipment inventory and at what frequency they are going to be looking at your invoices and accounts for additional savings.
- Vendor Performance Management – Clients with multiple locations will typically have scattered renewal dates. It is important to have the firm managing this inventory make sure new agreements are done at the right times and remaining lease balances are not being incorporated.
These firms should become a partner to manage this spend area with a common goal for savings and simplicity. This includes everything from reviewing invoices to helping locations with questions as they arise.
Conclusion:
Bringing in experts is the key to any organizations success because it is too costly to have this level of expertise on staff. Managed Service Providers that focus on mail audit and recovery give you this expertise and can find you savings and provide visibility that would have typically been overlooked.