Services
Our dedicated team of highly experienced consultants can offer you expert advice and guidance.
UNIQUE IN OUR AREA
Altus delivers significant savings
and adds real value
Since we started the business in 2004, Altus has become a leading independent firm, offering clients Audit, Consultancy, Managed Solutions, Procurement and much more.
We principally are based on reducing costs, improving service, increasing efficiencies, building relationships and providing insight and transparency.
The areas where we help our clients are listed below.
Print Management
We can review your print services arrangements to drive improvements and better solutions. Whether that’s creating a better management structure with your current provider or setting up an entirely new supply chain and ordering process, Altus can help.
Our team have extensive knowledge in this area and our independent review audit will guarantee saving and unlock new benefits
The benefits of having a print management include better productivity, reduced costs, savings and environmental benefits. Through our years of experience, Altus understands that working in partnership delivers major benefits to our clients that they could not achieve through a singular buying process from multiple sources.
We provide print consultancy services, and where appropriate implement technical support, which manages the supply chain of all items, resulting in a reduction of total costs. We are a preferred print partner, offering a wide range of products and services to our clients.
For a partner that only works on your behalf contact Altus for an independent review audit and see how we can add real value to all your print management requirements.
Postal Management
We save our clients in excess of 20% of their existing postal costs which goes straight to their bottom line.
Altus is the Leading Independent Postal Estate™ Management and Postal Consultancy Company. We’re committed to helping our clients build effective postal strategies and solutions that enable them to adapt innovatively to changing conditions, seize opportunities and achieve high performance. We specialise in everything Postal in this dynamic and fast-changing European Postal Market.
Since we started our business in 2004, we have saved our clients in excess of £325m through our consultancy and procurement services.
Without sounding arrogant, there is nothing we don’t know about the postal market, including regulatory management and we are relentless to ensure our clients have the optimum postal solution in place. No one knows the postal matter better than Altus.
We have full case studies from major brands and can provide these and direct conversations with our delighted clients.
Data Analytics
Data is valuable to your business and it’s powerful when processed, handled, analysed and visualised properly – our technology, called altusBI does exactly that. altusBI will bring your data together and provide you will actionable intelligence to further improve the efficiency of your Postal Estate®.
altusBI streamlines your data for reporting & analytics and will give you innovative business intelligence across your areas of expenditure. Having so much fragmented data in different formats can be a frustrating and time consuming process. It’s what we do with your data that matters.
Courier, Express & Parcels (CEP)
Ensuring our clients have the confidence to know they have the optimum B2C and B2B parcel solution in place to service their customers.
Full transparency and insight into top quartile rates and service.
Our unique insight into the CEP market gives you the very best industry experts to help you ensure that you have the right carrier partner in place with the right service offering and at the right price. Whether you use CEP for the delivery of parcels or documents to various types of customers such as internet retailing customers, business customer, and government agencies.
The CEP market covers suppliers distributing and delivering to your customers with a weight limit of up to 31.5 kilos per individual parcel.
This is an evolving and exciting market and our clients tell us when we are involved they always get a better service and price for their CEP profile – which delivers significant recurring annual savings. Importantly leading industry suppliers have stated on numerous occasions that a better, more accurate and easier to understand the statement of requirements, request for proposal and reliable distribution profile is inevitably issued to the market on our client behalf when we are leading the procurement process.
As much as 42% of parcel distribution costs could be carrier contingency/surcharging costs
33% of customers will not buy again if their delivery experience is bad.
82% of customers will tell their friends if they experience poor delivery service.
We help you get things right.
Get in touch and we will show you how to get the very best solution in place for all your Couriers, Express and Parcels.
Customer Contact Data
The right data in the right format, to the right customer at the right address every time.
Accurate and trustworthy data means you can have confidence when making strategic business decisions. For example, having accurate customer addressing for mailings, distribution of parcels and billing.
This is an area where there is so much wastage and hidden costs – you will be totally amazed. We have saved our clients significant savings, increased performance, conversions and reduced the level of returns from customers that you will be delighted with the results we can achieve.
We can help you take control of your data to improve outcomes and build stronger customer relationships and importantly reduce costs and improve customer experience.
We offer customer contact data software for:
- cleansing,
- standardisation,
- matching,
- monitoring,
- enhancement,
- profiling.
Our customer and address validation can help with Name & Address Validation which will result in more accurate and success of letters, packets and parcels arriving at the right customer at the right address on time.
How accurate is the information in your customer contact database? Your data is a valuable asset, yet you can only unlock this value if the information you hold is accurate.
Name and address validation from Altus will ensure you capture name and contact information accurately and that it remains up to date over time. Whether you collect customer name and address via web forms, an e-commerce website, a call centre or historical customer contact data within your business. The risk of poor quality data entering or in your business is high.
97% of UK organisation say they suffer from data errors.
61% of UK org say the most common cause of inaccuracies is human error.
Our solutions will give you confidence that the address is accurate and we can help you keep your customer contact data up to date.
We ensure your data is always fit for purpose. The name & address data in your database is constantly decaying.
Every day in the UK:
These are staggering statistics. Is it any wonder your data is decaying rapidly?
Our name and address cleaning tools will match your customer information against the range of data sets ensuring your data remains clean over time – removing those who do not want to be contacted or those who have moved or passed away will ensure the effectiveness of your communications. Delivered as a one off or as part of a more regular data cleaning strategy we have a range of tools to meet your needs.
Our solutions can save significant amounts on your postal and couriers, express and parcel costs.
You can now see why there is a high level of wastage and an opportunity to reduce costs and improve performance is achievable by contacting Altus today for free advice and guidance.
Direct Mail Specialists
Mail drives customers online and encourages e-commerce purchases. And mobile is making it easier than ever for people to do this.
Physical Mail is alive. In 2004 Royal Mail delivered 84 million letters each day, with the explosion of the internet this number has dropped to 62 million letters per day in 2017 – it’s still a staggering number each day.
Direct Mail campaigns still remain a key tool in the overall marketing plans of many businesses. When planned, executed and refined correctly, they can be a very effective way of gaining visibility with tangible and measurable results.
Receiving mail in the home is important to people.
On average mail is kept for 17 days; for advertising mail, 38 days; for door drops and 45 days for bills and statements.
Direct Mail drives people’s activity.
At Altus, we completely understand the importance of Direct Mail Targeting and we can help you identify your market and prospects, helping with conversion to sale rates.
We start off helping clients achieve the best postal rates for their Direct Mail and have delivered significant postal costs savings. Our analysis shows that 82% of Direct Mail users pay too much for their postage. The vast number of advertising mail services is confusing and we have saved 9/10 clients significant recurring revenue in their Direct Mail spend. That’s just one of the areas where we can help!
We can also add real value in the area of designing the mail piece, focusing on the right message and offer, and importantly provide help in maximising the impact of your campaign. Clients that see the highest response rates from their Direct Mail campaigns are those that integrate it with other marketing efforts. Also, one single mailing does not make a campaign.
People can’t imagine living without Direct Mail and we can help you target them with the right message at the right address at the right time.
Let Altus help you in many areas of your Direct Mail campaign from targeting and concept to design, from response and call to action to lowest postal costs, Altus can really add value and make a real difference to your business. Get in touch for our free advice and guidance.
Outsourcing
Love it or loathe it, outsourcing is now a permanent feature of business life. As companies search for cheaper and more effective ways of working, handing over non-core functions to lower cost specialists can be an alluring prospect.
Before you bring in third parties to run parts of your business, it is worth pausing to consider the risks. Some outsourcing deals fail dramatically and publicly. Rather more are quietly set aside as on (or both) parties look for an exit and an even larger number limp on, failing to deliver quite the benefits that were expected. There are many success stories – businesses that have used outsourcing to achieve dramatic savings shed themselves of expensive assets or build a capacity to grow in a way that would not have been possible using in-house resources.
Whilst there is no magic bullet, we believe a combination of common sense, a structured approach and learning from others’ experiences will go a long way.
If you have already outsourced or considering outsourcing the management of the following areas of operation speak to Altus for independent, impartial and expert advice.
- Print Management
- Postal Management – including hybrid mail
- Couriers Express & Parcel (CEP)
- Direct Mail
- Document Management
- Cost Management
Altus can provide the necessary insight and transparency that you may desire and welcome before you make any decision to either keep an operation in-house or to outsource. We will help you with knowledge, expertise, service, and cost saving to name a few.
Each part of our guide and process of outsourcing is here to help you make better-informed decisions and focuses on one stage in the lifecycle, beginning with the all-important initial ‘Assess’ Phase.
Please bear in mind, Altus are not advocates for outsourcing, nor do we supply outsourced services. We work with you to document the pros and cons and if appropriate build a compelling business case which ensures continued positive business justification.
Overview
Consideration is given to all key aspects of the outsourcing lifecycle, particularly with regards to the:
- The overall objective of the deal, which should be more than simple, short-term cost reduction.
- Financial benefits which can be delivered by an appropriate outsourcing contract.
- Costs which will need to be incurred in order to deliver these benefits.
- Risks which must be mitigated in order to ensure a successful outcome.
- Overall size and shape of the deal, ensuring that this is aligned with business requirements.
- A degree of change is required by both business and IT Functions in order to ensure that the outsourcing is successful for the full lifetime of the contract.
If required, we can help with the procurement of the areas of operation that we specialise – either as part of your procurement team or as lead.
The Altus outsourced method follows a clear and structured approach to business process outsourcing. Our comprehensive approach means we can support development, operating model design, business case negotiation, transition management and programme governance.
Our method is based on six phases of activity and 13 streams of work.
Digital and Hybrid Mail
Independent advice on what’s best for your business.
The term hybrid mail in a Postal context has evolved in recent years. Previously, the technology was concerned solely with converting digital data into physical letters at a distributed print centre. More recently as a result of internet technologies, this has opened up new delivery channels, the definition has extended to include email, mobile and SMS.
Altus can help with a range of operational and commercial opportunities in an increasingly digitised society. Your staff can create documents on their desktop and these are routed to a centralised print environment or sent for digital delivery.
Anyone familiar with the terminology and Hybrid Mail over the last 10 years will know that it’s evolved over time and occasionally is a catch-all description for mail that’s not obviously categorised such as Transactional or Direct Mail. So to be clear and avoid confusion this is our definition.
“Correspondence generated in the office, on the desktop or through back-office automation is captured, processed and routed to a high volume print and mail operation for production and despatch through postal operators or electronically delivered to customers through their preferred communication channel (email, mobile or SMS) and ingested into CRM or Enterprise Archive solutions.”
We also should clarify that Hybrid Mail is usually offered as a service, by printers, postal operators and business process outsourcers. As a service, this typically involves the provision of a technology platform, the print, enclosing and delivery of the physical item to the intended recipient at an all-inclusive price. The concept is that each organisation using the service submits their letters every day before a defined cut-off time, these are then merged into output batches which are more efficiently handled by the supplier and can be produced and posted through Royal Mail or sorted and despatch via Downstream Access postal contracts at a significantly lower unit rate.
More recently Altus have seen a change to the Hybrid Mail landscape, typically within large and medium-size organisations where there is a greater volume of both users and/or output created. In this scenario, organisations are buying the Hybrid Mail technology platform directly from the software providers. This is then generating an output that is either produced by internal centralised production facilities or in the majority of cases sent to their outsource print partner who handles the production alongside other transactional or marketing mail. The benefit of this approach is the de-coupling of the technology with the production services, it provides a less contentious migration to electronic delivery which can then be delivered either by the customer themselves or a supplier and more importantly gives the customer the freedom to move the production and postal contracts without the significant disruption of changing the Hybrid Mail technology platform.
Hybrid Mail has a role to play in almost every organisation, large or small – private or public sector. Often the attraction is purely financial through the significant cost savings but with the now mature underlying technology there are many additional benefits such as, MI and cost allocation to a departmental and user level, improved document management and brand compliance, electronic delivery in-line with your customer communication preferences, adherence to accessibility standards and help in meeting other regulatory and compliance requirements.
We have helped many organisations select the right Hybrid Mail solution for their business requirements through an initial audit to generate a requirement specification which ensures we help you select the right service or technology solution first time.
Talk to Altus for impartial and advice you can trust and rely on.
Document Management
Independent advice on what’s best for your business on Inbound & Outbound Document Solutions
Transactional Documents
All businesses generate some form of Transactional Documents as an output of their day to day processes. Many different factors will determine the type, volume and frequency as well as the composition, creation and delivery channel used. The recipients can be customers, suppliers and any other 3rd party involved in the supply chain or sales process.
Often the documents are financial with the obvious examples being invoices, statements and those associated with the collection or payment of funds, although each sector may have very specific documents that are transactional in nature. For example, health organisations transact with patients through appointment letters, invitations to book check-ups or for specific treatment. Insurance companies generate the whole life cycle of documents from quotes, policy documentation, certificates and other mid-term adjustments made to policies.
With the transactional document landscape being so diverse there is no single technology solution or service that provides the answer. The options are often a diverse and complex set of solutions offered by technology and business process outsourcing organisations who will sell businesses a solution that will almost certainly deliver your requirement on day 1 but is it the best or the right approach for your business now and in the future?
Technology advances in document composition, print and enclosing solutions coupled with the growing demand from customers to receive communications electronically only add to the challenges of defining and delivering the right strategy for your transactional documents.
If you already outsource some or all of the components you will undoubtedly have other challenges in the initial and future generations of outsourcing. With the erosion and migration of knowledge and Intellectual Property (IP) that is inevitable during the first generation outsource you will face some challenges. Your supplier can become the dominant party dictating your strategy to suit their services and business model, you lose confidence in your ability to invoke contractual rights such as audits or benchmarking. Do you really understand and feel empowered to challenge KPI’s, SLA’s and correctly interpret Management Information (MI) and invoices? When it comes to the end of the initial outsource contract, do you have sufficient knowledge and confidence to go back to market or do you feel forced to re-negotiate a new contract with the incumbent supplier which further exposes the erosion of knowledge within your business. Outsourcing is often the right solution for organisations but in order to enjoy a successful relationship with your supplier, one that supports your current business requirements and will support the future strategy you need independent knowledge and expert advice.
Altus can help.
Document Management
There is a vast amount of software available in the market, all aimed at streamlining business processes, and document management systems are one of the more useful offerings available in terms of helping companies go paperless.
Businesses are increasingly discovering that spending money and time on printing and storing paper-based documents is costly and not efficient. Not only is there a risk of physical copies getting lost and damaged, but you’re also responsible for keeping them on file. And they’ll soon stack up around your office.
By implementing moving things to a document management system (DMS) in your operations, you’ll free up the time to spend on other vital areas of your company. You’re also much safer knowing that all your precious documents and files are stored within a piece of software, as opposed to being scattered around a number of locations and various storage rooms.
Electronic Document Management (EDM) systems have evolved to a point where systems can manage any type of file format that could be stored on the network. The applications have grown to encompass electronic documents, collaboration tools, security, workflow, and auditing capabilities.
While many EDM systems store documents in their native file format (Microsoft Word or Excel, PDF), some web-based document management systems are beginning to store content in the form of HTML and much more. These policy management systems require content to be imported into the system. Once content is imported, the software acts like a search engine so users can find what they are looking for faster.
Cloud-hosted document management software has huge demand. Many companies are preferring cloud-hosted software to reduce their complexities and hardware maintenance costs.
Our independent subject matter experts help organisations from the largest financial enterprises to small and medium-sized businesses make the right decisions for the right reasons.
Talk to Altus today for independent, expert advice.
Cost Management
Cost management is fundamental to the success of your business and at every stage, you need rigorous cost control systems in place. Altus can help in the area of reducing your business costs through Audit, Consultancy, Managed Solutions and Procurement across all strands of significant costs to your business.
We help our clients contain and reduce costs through robust measurement and analytics of your large expenditure categories by base-lining the existing costs and achieving cost savings through our knowledge and expertise to meet your aspirations. We then manage costs throughout the whole process, from design and procurement where necessary to the implementation of your new lower cost product, service or solution. We do this thanks to the expertise of our team.
All of our cost reduction projects are actively led. As a result, we have acquired a large number of blue-chip clients, many referrals and a high level of repeat business.
Our skilled team are adept at providing reliable cost savings for any type of project, across a wide range of sectors.
It means programme time is reduced, no adverse issues emerge at the tender stage and cost certainty is introduced as early as possible.
Likewise, our team ensure that costs are carefully managed by monitoring and negotiating variations; monitoring and managing cash-flow, payments on account, and valuations; regular financial reporting; final account preparation; negotiation and sign-off.
If you would like to reduce the costs within your business. Please get in touch.
