It's a safe bet that medical professionals are still feeling the effects of 2014's sensational news headlines and misguided public opinion. (Ebola, anyone?) For the rest of us, the medicinal fog has lifted, and reality has set in-the reality of untapped opportunities in a rich vertical market, that is. Just ask Bob Maggio, president of Hauppauge, New York-based Maggio Data.
Maggio and his team reap the rewards of the medical sector on a regular basis. So when a distributor asked for help with a complex form for a large health care organization, the team immediately got to work. "Our mantra is: Find a need and fill it," Maggio said. In doing so, not only did the company ace the job, it scored a tall order of repeat business.
Here, Maggio shares the thought process behind the promotion and offers insight for distributors looking to cure whatever ails their customers.
Print+Promo (P+P): Describe a job of yours that you consider one of Maggio Data's best.
Bob Maggio (BM): Our customers often come to us with problems they encounter and enlist our help in coming up with a solution. In some cases, it is as simple as producing a form with existing capabilities; in others, it may lead to the development of a new product line, which happened to us a little while ago. Our distributor's customer asked him to help solve a bar-coding issue. The client was having trouble reading an ink jet bar code on a unit set when it came back to their office. By investing in high-res ink-jet printer equipment that we could run in-line on our collators or presses, we were able to produce a product that met the client's requirements and that gave birth to a new [health care] product line for us.
Here is an example. At the time, the distributor was a relatively small customer, but Rick Rossano, one of our regional sales managers, had made the company aware of the fact that we had particular expertise in health care applications. Our distributor had been doing some work for a large health care organization and was running into a number of problems. There were production issues as well as delivery problems. Now that the volume was growing, he felt it was time to explore other options with a very complicated form used for sign-up for a variety of health insurance programs. We produced it in several languages.
P+P: Please tell me a little more about this form.
BM: It was a complex form with consecutive bar coding, cross web gluing and a large number of parts exceeding the capabilities of most forms manufacturers. The numbering had to satisfy a rigid protocol. Also, the forms had to lie completely flat-something that had been a problem with past suppliers.
P+P: What other types of challenges did you encounter with this particular job? How did you overcome them?
BM: The most significant things that we did revolved around process. We developed a protocol that resulted in quality assurance rather than quality control. In other words, if a problem appeared anywhere in production, we knew about it right away and the problem was immediately corrected, as opposed to quality control where often mistakes happen, but are caught down the line through back-end inspection. We also engineered our collators so that all the imaging was done on-line, which assured exact matches and control of variable numbers. In addition, we employed bar-code reading and verification during production to guarantee that every document would be read accurately.
P+P: How was this a profitable promotion for your company?
BM: We have produced a number of orders for this customer and their client and we have been on time, every time. And, at the same time [we've met] all the stringent quality and complex requirements of these orders. On-time delivery is critical in
this market.
P+P: Do you have any advice for distributors interested in selling to the health care market?
BM: There are still some significant opportunities in print, and the health care/medical market is clearly one of them. It is growing and I feel [it] will require new features and capabilities as well. One often-overlooked area is the incorporation of I.D. cards in insurance packages. More and more companies are starting to use lower-cost I.D. cards (as opposed to heavy gauge embossed or thermal printed cards) for this application. At Maggio, we have in-line die-cutting capabilities, which give us the ability to integrate perf-out I.D. cards very competitively. It's all about the customer, and today's typical patient does not want to add to the bulk of the cards that they have in their wallet. In addition, there are all kinds of opportunities for integrated products and these are growing as well as bar-code applications.