When it’s time to replace your high-mileage data processing “vehicle”

Maybe like you, I tend to drive my cars for 200,000+ miles.  But, as the car starts getting up there in age and miles, things start breaking and they’re usually not cheap fixes.  There eventually comes a time to acknowledge that while the old car did well for you, a significant upgrade is needed and it can’t wait.  And then you get that new car (or newer used car in my case), experience all the upgrades and wonder why you didn’t upgrade much sooner!

Over the past year, I’ve been working with print and mail service providers to do the same thing with their data processing (DP) operation.  Similar to the car analogy, these PSP’s have gotten good mileage out of their old systems (FoxPro and other scripting, AS/400 or iSeries, mainframes), but as their businesses move forward, DP is just not keeping up.  And as the pace of new customers, jobs and service offerings accelerate, a breakdown in DP becomes very expensive and painful.

These customers became very good at “duct taping” DP (“we better add another manual QA check”) to keep it going.  But with all these “fixes” on top of old outdated tools, processing a customer file became an arduous and time-consuming process.  They also looked across the street at their neighbor with the new car and realized they could be a lot more comfortable driving their business.

Like my car story, when our customers made the upgrade to Quadient Ignite, they can’t believe they made due with the old “beater” for so long.  When they get their first taste of processing a customer file in a couple minutes, all is good in DP.  Are you ready for new-model DP software to drive your business forward?