Nottinghamshire County Council is a local government organisation that employs around 7,500 non-school based direct employees and provides more than 400 services to people living, visiting and working in Nottinghamshire.
Alongside service provision, the Council works to protect and shape the county’s environment and create the right conditions for a strong local economy, delivering in a way that provides the best possible value for taxpayers.
As an innovator and forward-looking organisation, the Council aims to improve efficiency and sustainability in its services. Working with Quadient, it successfully transformed outbound mail management, reducing costs, saving staff time, and creating a mail and fulfilment centre for the organisation and its public sector partners.
The challenge: to reduce costs and improve efficiencies
The Council issues approximately 750,000 letters a year. These are a mix of transactional communications that follow set templates, and ad hoc free-form mail such as general correspondence. Employees across the organisation generate mail, which goes to the Council’s Document Services fulfilment centre to process and dispatch.
“We wanted to save costs, speed things up and free up staff to carry out service specific duties,” explains Ian Hardy, Document Services Operations Manager. “Costs mainly come from labour and postage. On the labour side, it was no one person’s specific job to fold letters, lick envelopes and such, but those tasks consumed too much time for multiple individuals across the organisation.”
Ian recognised the opportunity to improve physical mail management, but also to establish new ways of working to stand the Council in good stead: “We saw the bigger picture beyond physical mail to digital-first, such as SMS and email, but also combined digital/physical mail and potentially an inbound/outbound mail solution. We recognise traditional communications channels will exist for years and co-exist beyond that for many more!”
Ultimately, Ian was interested in a ‘closed loop’ inbound/outbound mail solution, supported by the right equipment, software and business workflows. In this, the Council would issue paper-based correspondence, including forms for citizens to complete and return. The Council would scan the returned forms on a Quadient scanner and software solution. The information would then automatically populate appropriate Council back-office systems and/or be routed to relevant departments, reducing processing overheads.
The process: meeting needs now and in the future
The Council ran a procurement exercise and identified suppliers who could fully meet its needs, including Quadient.
Quadient’s proposed a solution would address the immediate need and offer growth potential for the future. It organised a demonstration and site visit for Ian and his team to ask questions directly of operators and hear their experiences and views.
"Quadient listened to what we wanted, where we wanted to go, and offered a proposal with a little bit of ‘creep’,” says Ian. “Importantly, that ‘creep’ didn’t feel like a sales pitch or an oversell, it suggested sensible additions and offered possibilities and opportunities for the future."
“It quickly became a partnership. Quadient knew what we needed because they have the experience - they are specialists in communications - and, most importantly, they’d worked with other local public sector organisations and understood our aspirations and vision.”
The solution: Quadient Impress
Quadient Impress is a comprehensive outbound document management platform that automates communications workflows and provides the flexibility of sending documents through print or digital channels.
The solution consolidates print queues across the County Council and its local partners. It prepares envelope contents, including any digital or physical attachments, ready for fulfilment so the correct message and contents get included in each envelope, mitigating the risk of human error.
Ian’s team planned and implemented a phased introduction starting with transactional, template-based communications and progressing to ad-hoc mail. The Council’s employees weren’t trained in mail fulfilment software and so some were apprehensive about what was involved. However, they found they could get up and running simply and quickly after only 15 to 20 minutes of online training.
“It was really easy,” says Ian. “For my team, Quadient provided the initial training and then we were able to train ourselves, leaning on Quadient for advice and support when needed. As a result, it wasn’t difficult to train staff who were novices to become, I think, best-in-class mail and fulfilment operators."
“For end-users, it’s been even easier; I created a user guide that is supplied to each new user ahead of implementation. The guide is also available for reference online and forms part of staff onboarding processes.”
The result: thousands of hours and £s saved
Following the phased introduction, upwards of 98% of Nottinghamshire County Council’s outbound mail now goes through a Quadient software solution.
From an initial introduction to a 30+ strong team, word quickly spread to other teams who wanted to get on board rapidly to gain the same benefits.
Ian says: “I have deployed several corporate solutions to date, none of which has been embraced by all staff with so much enthusiasm. It was lovely, there weren’t any barriers or people saying they didn’t want it, in fact, it was totally the opposite!”
Ian explains that shifting transactional mail onto Quadient Impress helped his team achieve efficiencies, but describes applying the new process to ad-hoc mail as “game-changing” because that impacted all staff across the whole organisation. It improved speed of action, brand consistency and sustainability. The move also recovered time and resources, enabled staff to work from any location and reduced human errors - one of the leading causes of data breaches.
On average, it saved 1 minute 50 seconds per mail item which, Ian says, adds up to tens of thousands of hours and frees up staff to do more serviced-specific duties across the whole organisation. Plus, staff are no longer restricted by location or technology - they can send multiple communication types, including physical mail, securely from their workstation and from any location.
In addition to the significant labour savings, the Council also achieved £200,000+ postage cost savings in the first 18 months by accessing more efficient postage rates, consolidating mail so that multiple items to the same address go into one mailing, and by eliminating some mailings altogether.
This, Ian explains, is down to having greater visibility into what is sent: “We’ve gone from manually folding something, putting it into an envelope and leaving it in a tray to be collected to doing all this in a secure, centralised, automated way. What’s more, there’s intelligence so we can track and report on mail and understand our habits. That’s important to continue to drive change and efficiencies.”
The result was faster mailing processes, but Ian wanted to extend this across the entire mail chain so the team contracted with Royal Mail for a premium service. Now, standard 2nd class mail submitted before 12pm is processed on the same day and drops on the door mat typically within two days. It took around five days when correspondence went through the legacy print, pack and post process.
What’s more, the team has extended the benefits of its centralised mail and fulfilment centre to other public sector organisations. By consolidating its partners’ mail with its own, the Council achieves lower postal rates for all. Partners also benefit from reduced costs, improved turnaround times and public sector correspondence compliance.
‘Signed for’/tracked mail is next on the list, however Ian knows the solutions and processes they now have will support them with digital communications too: “We know we’ve got the tools. That’s part of our growth and our partners’ growth plans.”
