Insourcing Fav’s

May 23rd, 2008 Chris

Despite my blog posting comment thing being broken, I did get quite a few comments emailed directly to me on my post yesterday on the 4 Hour Work week. I thought I’d hit the topic again, but geek out on you a bit.

If you recall – I’m a big believer in having tight control over stuff that goes to the customer. And I’m cheap. We have several pieces of technology that we use in the office that have allowed us to bring work back into the company from an outsourcer and in the process be more responsive to the customer. Oh yeah, and save money.

Colleen records a fair number of web classes and teleconferences. Customers receive copies of these on CD. We used to send out master copies to a disk duplicator service – one of those firms that will basically reproduce disks and print labels on them. Typically our quantities for duplication range from 10 – 200.

For smaller runs (that disk duplicating services won’t do), Casey in our office would have to sit there and manually copy and label each CD. Painful!

For larger runs, we had to send them out. It wasn’t that inconvenient but usually took a few days and cost ~$2 per disk. Not too expensive, but it added up over the year…

To make a long story short, we went looking at CD/DVD duplicators and came across a unit perfect for our needs. From Primera (and OEM’ed by Imation), it replicates CDs and DVDs, and ink-jet print the labels – all in batches of 20. They had larger machines (ie. could handle more disks) but at a substantial premium.

So for $1,500 (maybe less now), we purchased a unit. Now we crank out CD/DVD runs quickly – we just update the label, pop in the master disc, hit “Go” and go do something useful. It’s been working smoothly for almost a year now.

Now customers get their disks days sooner, we save a lot of time and it’s already paid for itself.

The moral of the story: for a microbusiness outsourcing is often not the answer. There are tools that allow you to do it in-house, reducing costs while providing better service to the customer.

We have several other pieces of technology that we’ve used to do likewise. More on those later…

C.

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