Print and Mail Outsourcing - History in The United States

History in The United States

In the world of statement processing and critical variable print customer communications, outsourcing first became popular with the largest financial services firms in the 1990s. The volume of printing and mailing and associated operational overhead on their balance sheets commanded considerable visibility. Consultants helped firms to ask the question, "What are my core competencies?" Can someone else do this better for me? The answer, unless corporations were mega print and mail experts running load-leveled operations, almost never included "print and mail" as a core competency. The answer was usually "yes".

The term "outsourcing" became very common in the print and mail business and later expanded to be very broad and inclusive of most any process by the year 2000, including offshore outsourcing, which rapidly became most synonymous with the term because of the political visibility.

But print and mail outsourcing has continued to grow with advancing technology supporting the industry since the onset of laser printing. Now color laser, digital presses and high speed full color commercial ink jet printing are coming into full production environments. "Print to mail" or "Print and mail" are now common terms for referring to the process of utilizing outside firms specializing in print and mail to handle these common production tasks.

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Famous quotes containing the words united states, history, united and/or states:

    What chiefly distinguishes the daily press of the United States from the press of all other countries is not its lack of truthfulness or even its lack of dignity and honor, for these deficiencies are common to the newspapers everywhere, but its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion. It is, in the true sense, never well-informed.
    —H.L. (Henry Lewis)

    When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.
    Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

    So here they are, the dog-faced soldiers, the regulars, the fifty-cents-a-day professionals riding the outposts of the nation, from Fort Reno to Fort Apache, from Sheridan to Stark. They were all the same. Men in dirty-shirt blue and only a cold page in the history books to mark their passing. But wherever they rode and whatever they fought for, that place became the United States.
    Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)

    The people of the United States have been fortunate in many things. One of the things in which we have been most fortunate has been that so far, due perhaps to certain basic virtues in our traditional ways of doing things, we have managed to keep the crisis of western civilization, which has devastated the rest of the world and in which we are as much involved as anybody, more or less at arm’s length.
    John Dos Passos (1896–1970)