Learn how this year’s winners solved business problems while cutting costs, saving time and making improvements
This year's lean communications contest entries demonstrated that lean principles and practices work well in a variety of industries and settings. The winners distinguished themselves by either using technology in clever ways or by redesigning processes that cut costs without sacrificing quality. In fact, by reducing expenses, they leaned left and achieved benefits.
Meet this year’s winning communicators:
- 1st Prize: Stacy Homan, Marketing Communications Manager, AtriCure, Inc. for “Delivering the Right Information, Right Now: AtriCure Prolifiq Software Implementation.”
The problem? How to meet the legal requirements for marketing materials while also meeting the needs of customers and the sales team. Besides following complex FDA regulations, the Marketing Communications group wanted to streamline the distribution of marketing materials to make it easier for the sales team to respond quickly to medical professionals.
The solution? The Marketing Communications team found Prolifiq Software, a vendor in innovative software solutions. The vendor created an application that allows sales reps to order and send marketing materials electronically from their BlackBerry® device. (The reps also can use e-mail but considering they travel more than 80% of the time, PDAs are a better tool for them.) The MarCom team also uses the technology at tradeshows to capture leads and to respond to customers’ requests immediately.
The results? With the Prolifiq application, reps can now reliably send electronic materials directly to a customer in a matter of seconds. The MarCom team reduced the need for printing and fulfillment by more than 40% in the first two quarters of 2008. At the same time, the team is distributing more than double the amount of materials, including professional education materials, videos and other data.
Stacy’s lean communications prize? An annual subscription to RaganSelect.
- 2nd Prize: Margaret Lahey, Integrated Marketing Coordinator, MailerMailer for “MailerMailer Email Newsletter Process Redesign.”
The problem? A monthly newsletterfor customers that took more than 15 hours to create with no ongoing utility and limited audience interaction.
The solution? Streamlined the entire process, including redesigning the newsletter. To speed up the creation process, Maggie and her team now use the company blog to post article content, which saves editing time. It also allows for readers to post comments, transforming the newsletter from a one-way to a two-way communication channel. The team’s graphic designer also created a template that they can reuse each month. To maximize the value of past issues, they created a new naming format to archive information and posted a list of newsletters online for subscribers to reference. And the team started to track newsletter performance so they could test which elements and subject lines readers favored.
The results? Production time is now 3 hours per newsletter, an 80% reduction. Yet newsletter effectiveness has increased. For example, readers open the new newsletter at a rate 60% higher than the industry average. Also, the newsletters now have a lifetime rather than one-time use. Readers can reference and reread useful content whenever they want.
Maggie’s lean communications prize? Ragan webinar of her choice for her and her team members, Chelsea Rio and Steve Scally
The problem? Both organizations wanted to reduce the design and printing costs of their annual shareholders’ report, which was a significant expense.
The solution? The organizations took different approaches to reach their goals, although both brought work in-house.
Kimberlee of Chelan and her team members, Heather Irelan, Melia Mayer, Thad Hunt, Kathleen Brooks, and the mail room staff, all pulled together to create ROI: Return on Ideas.
They trimmed the report’s narrative from 21 pages to 7, and used more graphics and a timeline to say more in less space. They reduced the print quantity by almost 50% and copied the report in-house on a digital color press. They also posted the entire report on the website. (Elected commissioners and other community leaders use the report as a reference so Chelan didn’t want to eliminate the print version entirely.) Employees proofread.
Andy said Teradyne also wanted to continue with a paper version of their report. To save costs and time, Andy and his team member Evan Kuhlman separated the shareholder letter from the financial section of the report. This provided more flexibility on messaging, design and timing. The four-page letter also is a less expensive recruiting tool than the bound annual report. An in-house designer also worked on the letter. The results? Chelan cut its out-of-pocket costs by about 75% thanks to the lower quantity and all of the changes. Teradyne saved a significant sum too in external graphic fees and about two weeks in cycle time. As an added benefit, Andy also was able to provide a development opportunity for one of his young staff members to work directly with the CEO. Both Chelan and Teradyne leaned left with their annual reports—pulling back on features to make their report simpler and less costly.
Their lean communications prize? Kimberlee and Andy get to choose a free Ragan manual.
This year’s winners also distinguished themselves in another way. They all renamed their contest entry document. Believe it or not, 50% of the entries kept the original document name, “2008contestentry.doc.” These entrants relied on the contest administrator to rename, store and recover their documents accurately. (For the problems with bad document names, see my blog.)
At any rate, congratulations to the winners of the second lean communications contest! Here’s to doing more with less and getting great results!
|
RSS
STORE
CART
