Helping Our Customers Achieve Success. It’s Why We’re In Business.
Every company talks about customer satisfaction and quality, but not every company is willing to make the kinds of investments in people and processes that drive real value for their customers.

Standard Register is. In fact, our mission, our purpose, is to help companies achieve superior results by improving their business processes. It takes more than innovative solutions to deliver that value; it also requires an emphasis on business excellence and customer satisfaction.

We’ve invested in customer-management tools that ensure we understand the challenges our customers face before we develop a product or service. We’ve also implemented rigorous performance-management methods that provide us added visibility and accountability for delighting our customers.

The Standard Register Business Excellence Model
The Standard Register Business Excellence Model serves to keep our customers at the forefront of how we manage our business. Based on the Baldrige National Quality Program’s criteria for performance excellence, the model keeps all Standard Register associates focused on the same goals and provides a framework for measuring our performance based on how well we satisfy our customers and other stakeholders.

Every process within Standard Register – from communications to closing a sale to order entry to manufacturing to shipping to invoicing – impacts our customers. An important element of our Business Excellence Model, Process Management, empowers our associates to continuously find ways to add even more value to our customers and make it easier for our customers to do business with us.

To Do The Job Right, You Need The Right Tools
Standard Register uses several process-improvement tools, including Six Sigma, Lean and Action Workout, to create a “culture of quality” where all employees consider process improvement part of their jobs.

Six Sigma is a highly disciplined, data-driven methodology for improving business processes and quality. Six Sigma contributes to our customer focus by forcing us to look at our business processes from the outside in, considering customer requirements first and foremost. By understanding what our customers need most from SR to be successful, be it reducing product defects, product costs or time to delivery, we’re able to make a difference in areas that are critical to meeting customer needs. And the rigorous Six Sigma approach helps us to accelerate and sustain improvements.

Lean is a process-improvement methodology that focuses on speed, efficiency and reducing waste. Whereas Six Sigma is closely associated with improving quality, Lean works to accelerate cycle times and reduce the cost of any process by removing waste and eliminating non-value-add cost. Our customers’ needs are constantly changing, and tools like Lean – an important complement to Six Sigma – help us to be responsive.

Action Workout is a systematic, problem-solving methodology that allows Standard Register associates to target smaller scale, departmental-level process-improvement opportunities that affect customer satisfaction and performance excellence.

Our Approach to Quality Is Simple. We Start With Our Customers.
Every process-improvement project at Standard Register begins with the question, “What performance standards must be met to satisfy our customers?” Our Voice of the Customer program helps us listen to and understand our customers’ needs.

Voice of the Customer is a proactive, multidimensional program that keeps us on top of our customers’ current and future needs, as well as their performance expectations of Standard Register in critical areas such as quality, delivery, responsiveness and value.

Each year, we use information gathered from surveys, interviews and customer scorecards (a performance report card) to understand what our customers believe are critical-to-quality (CTQ) characteristics. CTQs are what our customers say they need most from us to be successful. We then work to align our business with these CTQs, and use Six Sigma, Lean and Action Workout to drive improvements.

To Help Our Customers Be Successful Well Into The Future, We’re Investing In Quality Today.
Six Sigma is not some marketing buzzword we toss around to impress customers. Standard Register’s commitment to Six Sigma and operational excellence is pervasive. Every Standard Register associate – from the CEO on down – completes some level of Six Sigma training.

An extensive investment has been made in training Black Belts – full-time Six Sigma “experts” dedicated to identifying process-improvement opportunities. Six Sigma Black Belts are responsible for driving process-improvement initiatives that result in significant improvements in quality, productivity, cost and customer satisfaction.

Our Commitment To Excellence Is Making a Difference.
Our Six Sigma and other excellence initiatives are delivering results. Here is just one example:

Managed Care Organization Sees Reduced Turnaround
Time On Health Benefits Packages

Each year, millions of employees receive a benefits information packet during their company’s open enrollment period. Health insurers have a small window to produce and distribute the packets, and delivery time and information accuracy are critical to members’ satisfaction.

Standard Register provides outsourcing support for many health insurers, including printing, kitting and mailing benefit information packets. One of our clients, a large managed care organization, wanted to get benefits packets into their members’ hands more rapidly. Using Six Sigma analytical tools, Standard Register identified the root causes of the existing cycle time and applied various programming and process improvements. The turnaround time to produce and mail a benefits package was reduced from 5 days to 24 hours on at least 95% of the orders, while maintaining accuracy. And, we’re going for 24-hour turnaround 100% of the time by further streamlining the process.

We’re passionate about adding superior value to customers today and evolving to meet their future needs. We’re leveraging our business excellence system, our technology and capabilities, and our people to make it happen.