“You Can’t Manage What You Can’t Measure”

The task of how to optimize production mail environments has continued to dominate conversations throughout the last several years. As increased labor costs and surging supply chain complications have added continued pressure to production mail facilities and service bureaus running large mail operations, most are looking at new ways to monitor performance and increase efficiency. While several options are available that allow managers to view high level machine efficiency statistics, few solutions offer the advanced metrics that Bell and Howell’s IQ software suite can. From assessing performance at the piece level, to measuring efficiency across jobs, machines, operators, and shifts against baseline throughputs, the IQ suite provides the raw data and visualizations that can revolutionize how mail floors are managed.

Three Diminishing Costs

There are three notable diminishing costs most important to production mail managers: time, labor, and materials. Supply chain complications have driven up costs of paper, envelopes, ink, and virtually everything that production mail facilities rely on. Likewise, with labor costs on the rise, the need to track employee efficiency and maintain workforce productivity has risen. Managers are focused on the increasingly important task of balancing all these important resources and ensuring that the production floor is running optimally and not underperforming when it comes to mail throughput, labor hours, job completion, and more.

IQ Software Suit Components

Bell and Howell’s IQ Suite is a comprehensive software collection that has three major components: IQ Item, IQ Performance, and IQ Metrics. From validating individual item status and tracking batches and jobs across multiple sites and systems, IQ Item and IQ Production provide factory production intelligence and real-time job level tracking required for production mail environments. These tools allow production mangers to do away with the tedious processes of running around with clipboards and manually collecting productivity information. IQ Metrics goes further.

IQ Metrics

IQ Metrics provides highly intelligent productivity visualizations, allowing greater insight into floor efficiency. It unlocks superior managerial control through its efficiency models that are intricately tailored towards specific jobs, machines, operators, and more. These tools normalize efficiency measurements across varying jobs and machine types, showing more precise analysis and creating data breakdowns that allow managers to adopt pay-for-performance automation.

IQ Metric’s management dashboards break down operator throughput, resource throughput, and prepare operator efficiency statistics that are highly useful in determining where production slowdowns are occurring.

Predictive Intelligence

What we’ve developed in IQ Metrics are the advanced models that help demonstrate not only historical performance through different user dashboards, but predictive intelligence based on advanced computations, giving management analysis based on operators, what systems they are operating, past run rates, and more.

Looking Forward

What we’ve done at Bell and Howell is listen to our customers and designed a suite of IQ solutions that matches the changing demands of production floors and the needs of their managers.
You’ve most likely heard the phrase “Do more with less” before. It’s a common saying that accurately summarizes the goals of production mail floors in streamlining operations and squeezing value from often inflexible set of circumstances and resources. We like to attribute it to a lot of what we do at Bell and Howell – from producing high-speed solutions, dramatically simplifying asset management with our remote monitoring and repair services, or by empowering managers through our IQ software suite and the power of information to unlock further value.

Being industry leaders for as long as we have, our long-tenured employees have the acute ability to understand your concerns and forecast what you may need down the road. We’re here to help amplify successes across a full spectrum of production mail operations.

To learn more about IQ software suite and how it can help you revolutionize your production operations, reach out to us through our contact page.