Enabling Price Competitiveness Saves Small Business from Bankruptcy

This $4M document scanning company in Dublin, OH was fighting a losing battle competing with the likes of Xerox to win large and lucrative contracts with the City, County and State RFPs. Xerox had large data entry centers abroad and thus presented to prospective clients an irresistible advantage of a large company with lower prices.

Customer Pain Points

The process of prep-work, scanning and data indexing was very labor intensive, and the company’s breakeven price was high at an average of 11 cents a page. Competitors were quoting 7 – 8 cents per page.
Being labor intensive, there were lots of errors and the company could not afford further resources on the quality check process.
The turnaround time was long, and customers were not happy with the wait. The company tried a 24-hour work cycle, but the graveyard shift was plagued with absenteeism, low quality and high cost.
Getting trained labor was difficult, the costs were high, and there was lots of employee turnover.

Our Assessment

The company needed a low-cost source of data entry as that was the single largest cost component
Labor was not well managed and lacked a competitive benchmark to indicate what a good output (for e.g. keystrokes per hour) was. Methodology Adopted
The entire process flow was mapped from end to end.
Data Entry managers from the US went to our Bangalore office and trained 50 data entry staff.
A quality check process was inserted at each of the four stages in the process.
The work structure was re-arranged so that a continuous 24-hour cycle was maintained.

Results

The company saw a dramatic improvement in quality and significant cost reduction allowing Sales to put in competitive bids. The output from the remote data entry staff put pressure on local staff to do better. The company doubled its sales within 18 months of the new process.