LEAN: A Journey of Personal Transformation
Michael Epstein Bio In February 2012 I auditioned during an open casting call in Philadelphia for the TV show, Extreme Weight Loss. When I found out that the interview was going to be at the Four Seasons Hotel, I thought it was a “sign.” This was the hotel where I had married my wife Nanci twenty years ago! And what a lucky sign it was! After the interview and selection process, we started shooting the show. I was on top of the world! The first week of Boot Camp I had to undergo standard medical testing. I soon learned that I had failed one of the heart tests that showed there was plaque in my arteries. I was told that I could no longer be on the show because the exercise required could be too strenuous on my heart. They gave me a chance to take another test, and if I passed, they would give me a green light to continue on Chris Powell’s program. That’s when the adventure began! Not only did I pass the test, but also I proceeded to hit every goal set for me and achieved my total weight loss goal at the end of nine months – a feat that was never accomplished before! I had lost 53% of my body weight and had brought my body fat down to 10%. At 49 years old, I had transformed my mind and body through a dedicated effort to change my life. Along the way I just happened to lose 221 pounds. But, this wasn’t just about weight loss. It was about transformation … a transformation of my mind. After I started believing in myself, I realized there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do; no barrier I couldn’t breakthrough. There is a solution to every problem if you believe! In weight loss, in life and in your business! I’m delighted to share some of my tips that might help others achieve their personal and business goals. Information presented in this book has come from several sources and has been aggregated and modified by Bob Zagami, former Chairman of the AIIM International Board of Directors.
Chapter One: It’s All About Transformation My name is Mike Epstein and I’ve never had a bad day in my life! That expression about never having a bad day in my life is one that my Dad used to use and I continued its use for him after he died. I used that expression every day that I went through my 221-pound weight loss on ABC’s Extreme Weight Loss. I had grown to 417 lbs. before I was selected to be on the reality weight loss show at 49-years of age … the oldest cast member Chris Powell had ever worked with. Even though I never had a bad day in my life, when I was over 400 lbs., I didn’t do a good job getting through those days. I wasn’t good enough for my family. I wasn’t good enough for my business. And I wasn’t good enough for myself. I told my family at the beginning of my physical transformation that I wanted to be a hero for my wife and our kids. By the end of my year with Extreme Weight Loss, I weighed 196 pounds and with just 10% body fat, I was in a position to build that guy from the ground up, back in the weight room to be, not fat, but strong. Morbidly Obese is a term we hear so often nowadays that we forget it’s real meaning: Fat to the point of being deathly ill! I was killing myself and this transformation I underwent, and that I hope to prevent others from having to undergo, literally saved my life! What I didn’t realize at the start of my transformation was that it would be about so much more than weight. When I finally unleashed the hero within from under those layers of fat, I found a guy who not only was healthier, but a guy who was a better family man and a better businessman. The lessons I learned throughout my weight loss journey are lessons that can be applied to all aspects of your personal and business life. It was not just a weight loss journey … it was a total transformation of my mind and body.
I always wanted to be a superhero.
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Chapter Two: Honest Evaluation Throughout my life I continued to gain weight. It caught up to me in my 30’s, after my dad died in a tragic automobile accident in 1995. All of a sudden, I was over 300 pounds, then 350, 400, 450! My highest weight was in December of 2011 … 453 pounds. My kids only ever knew me as an obese man. Their whole lives I was big and they loved me all the same. I never worried that I wasn’t loved because of my size, but I did wonder what sort of opinions their friends had or thought or shared. People are concerned about bullying today in schools. Here I was worried that I could actually be the cause of that bullying. I wasn’t the cool, active Dad. I was the guy who had to have a special extension piece to add to seat belts so that they could wrap around my body! I was the dad who weighed as much as the four-drawer file cabinets that lined my office walls. And office chairs were known to break under my weight. I was the guy who had to get weighed on special equipment! When I went to the doctor’s office, they first had to pull out a special medical scale. Then, they had to add this extra piece to the scale that would add another 100 pounds to its capability. Even though I had been blind to my health for so long, I wasn’t blind to the man I saw in the mirror every day. I knew I wasn’t healthy. It was time to do something about it, and the opportunity to do it on national television allowed me to finally set meaningful goals to change my life forever. Note: I nformation in some of these chapters was compiled from works created by Reji Laberje, author and education speaker working with Michael Epstein.
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Getting weighed on a freight scale. You have to start somewhere. Credit - ABC
Chapter Three: Set Goals When you finally make up your mind to do something about a problem, then you have to do something about it. This is the part that most of you understand and have probably addressed at some point in your lives when faced with a challenging situation. In my case, it was my weight and impact it was having on my family and business. It wasn’t just “my” problem; it became everybody’s problem because I was so big. Understanding that you have to do something isn’t really going to help much. Understanding that in order to accomplish something you are going to need written goals that will provide you with the guidance necessary to track your progress and validate the effort you are putting forth to change something very important to you and your loved ones.
Planning for success. SMART Goals!!
For me, my goal was to lose weight, but more importantly I wanted to become the husband and father that I had not been because of my physical condition. You first have to understand what you want to accomplish in life, and then set the appropriate goals to get there. First, you must come to grips with what caused you to be in the situation you are in. For me, it was emotional and I was hiding behind low self-esteem and my desire to break out and become a different person. You will have temporary goals, business goals, sales goals, family goals and they can often change along the journey to change your situation. But you must also have short-term goals and long-term goals. And all of your goals must be smart goals. A smart goal must be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time bound.
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Chapter Four: Overcome Obstacles to Success
There can be bumps in the road. Follow the plan.
Many people don’t know this, but I almost didn’t make the show. We told our stories and we underwent medical tests. That last part, the medical test, was what seemed to end my hope of this experience helping me with my weight and my food addiction. I was told I wasn’t healthy enough to do something so drastic with my body. They told me I could stay until the end of the week, if I wanted to.
My kids wanted me to come home. I’d seen other people leave. My wife was worried for me. And I was crushed. I had made a decision to change and, before I even got started, I had obstacles. In business, we always run into obstacles en route to our goals. The question really becomes whether the goals are worth the obstacles. For me, the goal was absolutely worth the risk. My heart conditions were minor. While at the training facility, I was still getting medical attention. I was determined to work hard and take things slowly. I was going to take whatever achievement I could accomplish here and bring it home with me as a strong start to keep me going on my own. I didn’t realize it, but the producers actually saw me sticking around and working hard even though they had told me I wasn’t going to be on the show. Behind the scenes, they started talking. They looked at more tests and reversed their decision … I could stay! This is true in business, too. Customers appreciate an extra effort and they reward us with loyalty. They see how we deal with unexpected issues and they learn to respect us. Over and over again, we have to make the decision to stick to the goal. I needed to have a path … a plan. And then, I needed to work that plan. You need to set your goal and stick to it. Then, you need to see all the points needed to get to that goal and stick to each of those points, too. In my weight loss, I set realistic, attainable goals. In business, maybe your final goal is to increase sales by $100K, but your first, smaller goal is to add a single new client or account. Define the big goal. Define the small goals. Stick to them! And make your own personal roadmap to success.
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Chapter Five: Build a Stronger Foundation The one thing I had to stay focused on was that I was somebody special, and people were counting on me to be successful on this journey. I needed a strong foundation that consisted of many other people who would support me! I knew it was not something I could do on my own. Just because I was obese didn’t mean that I didn’t bring value to this world. I had something special … something super … and I could make something good happen. I just needed a little help. That’s where my friend, Chris Powell, came in when he answered my letter and took me on as an Extreme Weight Loss client. Along with Chris, I had access to a personal trainer, a nutritionist, a psychologist and many doctors who monitored me every step of the way. But they didn’t just take measurements and make notes in the folders - they were just as invested in the program and the results as I was. I was surrounded by goodness in my wife and kids. I needed to bring something good to them. My solid foundation at home, on the road, and with the program team is what gave me the inspiration to continue moving forward, even when there were temporary setbacks. Without this solid foundation and the free flowing communication, motivation and encouragement, a project of this magnitude would not have been possible. You never have this kind of success without have a strong foundation to work with and build upon. This was about saving myself. My dark side was an addiction to food and it kept me from being a lot of things, including being there for my kids the way I wanted to be, without keeling over on them. Now, they can catch me off guard and not be afraid that I’m going to die. I always knew that regardless of how challenging or frustrating this journey would get, I had a strong foundation to fall back on, recoup, and start over again with a more determined effort to break through the next barrier – whatever that barrier or challenge might be. It’s no different in business. Building a strong foundation with multiple resources that have their own unique specialties will carry you through the challenges and bring success to you and your team.
My Home Trainer Mark Quigley. We spent a lot of time together. 5
Chapter Six: Compete When I was a kid, I used to hide in comic books, or, rather, I hid behind them, with snacks and other secretive eating. All the while, I was missing the lessons that the superheroes in those comics had. They were life lessons that I didn’t discover until I was over 450 pounds and in danger of dying at a very young age. Those 450 pounds were weakness. They made my health weak, my relationships weak and my family weak. And I recognize that food isn’t everybody’s emotional outlet. Maybe it’s disconnection, greed, an unwillingness to change or simply a lack of planning any aspect of your life. Nobody is perfect, but you can stop these bad things before they hurt you or your business and the good that you set out to do in that business. Instead of hiding behind my fears, I should have been learning from them. I want you to have the opportunity to do that learning, and your business to have the benefit of that learning, without having to fall victim to your weaknesses like I once did. Chris Powell instilled an incredible desire within my mind and body. He pushed me, he drove me, he taunted me and he made me realize that if I was really going to change, and make this a real transformation, then I was going to become competitive in every aspect of my life. And the first person I had to compete against was myself. I had to overcome and compete against all the bad habits that got me to this place. I had to overcome and compete against all the fears that I might once again fail on this journey to lose this weight once and for all and become the man I wanted to be and the man my family and business needed me to be. You must be competitive with yourself and your surrounding every day of your life. Stick to your goals, recognize and overcome your fears, and compete every day to make something happen and continue moving forward. Training with 5 time World Heavyweight Champion Evander Holyfield. Really?! 6
Chapter Seven: Enjoy the Small Victories I spoke earlier about short-term goals, longterm goals and the value of SMART goals. As you move forward in a positive direction and begin to see the success you can achieve by understanding what you have to complete each day, you should recognize the small victories and celebrate your progress. Victories often surprise you because you will be focused on the larger goals you have established in your personal development plan or your business plan. During my training there would be things that happened that made me sit back and take them in, and appreciate them for what they were … small victories but huge gains toward my ultimate goals and objectives.
Talk about a great victory. Aidan hugging me!
For example, the day I realized that I could bend over and tie my own shoe, or the day I walked up a flight of stairs and realized that I wasn’t out of breath or breathing hard. Those are victories, and you feel fantastic when you understand how important they are in the overall plan. While some of the victories will be physical in nature, because losing weight is a very physical process, other victories will be extremely emotional. The one that will always stay fresh in my memory and I think about it everyday, was the day the kids hugged me and wrapped their arms around me for the first time in their lives! While it wasn’t a goal, it was the result of meeting goals that got me down to a physical size that allowed this great moment to happen. Stop and enjoy these moments because they will reinforce why you started your journey in the first place. Whether that small victory happens at home or in the office, it’s important, and you must recognize it, appreciate it, and build upon it to stay focused on your ultimate goal.
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Chapter Eight: Participate, Don’t Spectate When you are over 450 pounds, you are not healthy. When you are not healthy you become the stranger on the sidelines – the person everyone else is looking at, and it’s not a nice place to be. As my kids were growing up, they were playing with other kids and their parents – because I couldn’t play with them. I wanted to play with them. It tore me up inside physically and emotionally to know that I was missing such an important part of their growing up because I was always the spectator on the sidelines, the parent on the bench, or the person standing because I couldn’t fit into a seat. I wanted to be the father throwing grounders to my son or simply playing catch with him. I wanted to be able to play lacrosse with the kids in the backyard. It would have been fantastic just to be able to roll around in the grass and tickle them, but I couldn’t – I was the spectator. When I lost all the weight, it was like starting to live life all over again, enjoying the things I missed out on and turning from a spectator to a participant was an incredible turning point in my life. I was finally able to do the things my kids wanted me to do. I was finally able to participate in whatever game or event they were enjoying and I realized I could enjoy it with them. What an incredible feeling it is to get off the sidelines and into the game. The same holds true for business, get engaged, be a participant and get off the sidelines if you really want to make something happen and let people know you have changed.
Finally a participant. 8
Chapter Nine: Face Mortality In an earlier chapter I mentioned being morbidly obese. That is a very scary thing but for years I simply refused to recognize it and understand that I had to do something about it or die. Just writing the words now, even after losing all the weight, brings back memories of what I use to be and how my life could have been different. I had to face my own mortality to understand that it was time to change my life and change the conditions that put my life at risk. Whatever your challenge is, and hopefully it doesn’t involve your mortality, you must face it head on and understand how you got to this place to begin with. The transformation process can’t be focused on just one thing, because when you face a life or career crisis, it is often a combination of things that brought you to the point of realization that you have to change something or die, or lose your family, or lose your business. It has to get real ugly before your finally look in the mirror and commit to yourself, your loved ones, or your business partner that things are going to change. The first step is recognizing that you have finally hit a wall, and moving forward in that same direction can, and will, have consequences that are going to ruin your life or business. Once you are willing to face your own mortality, then you can start to reverse the issues that brought you to that realization. In my case, it was the needle on the scale going over the 450 pound mark, the highest I had ever weighed in my life, and a weight that was going to kill me.
I didn’t realize how big I was until I saw this picture.
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Chapter Ten: Face Reality, Be Positive Before you get to the point of facing your own mortality, there are a lot of “almost” bad days, especially if you are weight challenged as I was. So how did I get to that point in my life? Despite these challenges I always remained positive and never had a bad day in my life! I would wake up each day and I was very stressed out about my responsibilities at home and work, and was very inactive. A workout might have helped with stress if I ever tried, but it was a lot easier to comfort myself with food. I might grab a quick bite before I left the house for work. Then, on the way to work, I’d go through McDonald’s drive thru. I didn’t just pick up one breakfast, but breakfast plus some extra food that might help me get through the day. I thought I needed to be full to be ready to face life and by the time I even got to work, I had probably consumed 2000 calories. In the morning, I had that extra McDonald’s if I needed a snack. Lunch might be Chinese food. In the afternoon I would have candy, just a little something to get me through the day. On the way home I would stop at a convenience store to pick up a snack. Then, I’d be home and ready to eat a good, big, family meal that my wife had cooked for all of us. Food was an obsession and it allowed me to hide behind my weight. It was crazy! Everything was negative about this routine. As I started my journey to make a new me, it was critical that I faced reality and turned my negative habits and thoughts into positive habits and thoughts. I’m not going to tell you it was easy, if it was I probably would have done it years ago. It was brutal. Face the reality of your personal or business challenges, turn the negatives to positives, change your frame of mind and transform your body or business into something incredible.
A Cheesesteak hotdog. Mindless eating. 10
Chapter Eleven: A New Passion Read any best-selling business book or personal self-improvement story and there is one singular word that will always be front and center, one that will stick with you long after you have forgotten what you read in the first place, the word is passion! Some people will say that overweight people don’t have passion. That perceived losers don’t have passion, or that failing businesses don’t have passion … that’s simply not true. It’s there; we just have to believe it and find it. How can one word be associated with everything that is positive? Actually the answer is rather obvious once you understand your circumstances and have developed a plan to change your personal or The letter I wrote to Chris Powell. A Reminder. Never Give Up! business circumstances. You can’t be passionate about anything if you have not written down your goals and objectives and review them every day. Without a goal you can’t have any passion, because you are simply not being serious about changing something. You also can’t fake passion; it has to come from the heart and the head when something positive and exhilarating is happening to you or your business. Once you have faced the reality that things must change, and once you have determined what it is that you are going to change and understand how you must change – then you are simply at the starting line. The finish line is far off in the distance. In fact, you can’t even see it because there are so many interim steps and goals that must be achieved before you even get close to your final objectives. The passion will come when you accept that things are going to change and chart the course for that change. As you make reach attainable milestones and start to achieve your goals, the passion will build inside you. You see progress, you see changes, and you realize that you can do it and that just adds more fuel to the fire burning inside you - it’s passion. You can’t fake it. You’ve got to believe it.
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Chapter Twelve: The Secret to Success: Changed Habits It goes without saying that to achieve success in your personal or business life you will have to change some of your bad habits that contributed to getting you where you are today. The good news is that you have already figured that out. A funny thing happened as I began to go through my transformation. I started to go through all of these wardrobe changes and, all of a sudden, I was feeling more confident. I think I cleared out and donated a dozen bags of clothing. A little later in the transformation, I dumped another 15 bags. I kept a few pieces - not to get back into them - but because I wanted to remember where I once was. All of a sudden I realized that I was changing my bad habits and seeing the results. I could dream of being a better leader in my business. I work in sales and, early in my career I made a lot more sales calls because I got to know people. I met with them, face-to-face and they knew me. When I had gotten bigger, I stopped doing that because I was ashamed of being in front of people. I was even ashamed in front of my own family. I had to believe that I could change these bad habits. When I did, I was going to be a better father for my kids. I was going to be a better husband for my wife. I didn’t have to hide from her. I could take her out because I liked the way I looked. I would be there for her for much longer because I was healthy, again. 
 Changing my bad habits made me realize the importance of replacing them with good habits.
I went through a few wardrobe changes. Gab and me in my 5X shirt. 12
Chapter Thirteen: Part of a Team I’m sure you have heard the expression that there is no “I” in team! This is one of the first things you must come to grips with your challenges, especially if you must transform your mind and body like I wanted to. Notice that I didn’t say I had to, because that doesn’t work. I reached a point in my life where I truly did want to change and this time I resolved to make it happen. What was different this time?
My team. Being surprised by Chris Powell
What made me so confident that I just knew the journey that I was embarking on was finally going to be the successful one, the one that would get me healthy again with a dramatic weight loss and a mind that was finally going to in sync with my body? It was the team. I had tried this many times before and I failed, because it was just me! When you face overwhelming odds, whether in your personal life or your business life, you simply should not, and cannot, try to do it on your own. It isn’t going to work. And you know I’m right because you have been there before also … we all have. You must first believe in yourself and then you must believe in your team. They are going to be your support system. Whether you are losing weight, playing sports or managing a business – you have to work together as a team. Pick your team carefully, know their capabilities, understand their commitment and make sure everyone knows what the goals and objectives are and that they are in it to win it, with dedication, passion and excitement. I could never have accomplished the transformation of my mind and body without Chris Powell, his team and my family. Knowing and understanding my team from day one, allowed me to make the leap of faith that this time was going to be the biggest victory of my life.
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Chapter Fourteen: Momentum After passion, I think the second most important aspect of a personal or business transformation must be momentum. As you embark on your own personal journey for whatever it is that you want to change – the goals, victories, objectives, plans and passion must all be mixed together to create forward momentum that will propel you to success. The more challenging the goal, the more likely you are to have some temporary setbacks that could stall your success. Your passion will help you get through these dips and put you back on track to once again building up momentum that provides constant reinforcement that you are winning the battle. Momentum is like a snowball. Make one snowball and throw it at somebody and all your momentum is lost. Having a snowball fight with constant interruptions, hits and misses and there is no coherent plan to have something meaningful happen. However, take that same snowball and roll it around in the snow and make it bigger and you can see it is bigger and would hurt more if you throw it. But don’t throw it; roll it around in the snow some more and it continues to grow in size and strength. Then take the same snowball and start rolling it down the hill. You watch it get bigger and bigger and go faster and faster until it is unstoppable! That’s what you have to do with all the components of your personal or business plan. Keep putting things together and making everything stronger and you will become unstoppable and before you know it you have reached your goal. That’s what happened to me during my year of incredible weight loss and the total transformation of my mind and body. The passion drove me to success, but the momentum is what got me over the finish line.
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Nothing could stop my momentum. Hang Ten!!
Chapter Fifteen: Be Realistic, It Is Not for Everybody I was very fortunate to have the opportunity of a lifetime to actually transform my mind and body over the course of twelve months and being able to dedicate the time and resources needed to make it happen. I was very fortunate to have a loving family – my wife and my rock Nanci and our three children, Ethan, Gabby and Aidan were understanding of my need to change my life so I could be a better husband and father and do what was necessary to give me an opportunity for a healthier life and get out from under the consequences of what being morbidly obese was going to do to me if I didn’t change. I was very fortunate to have my brother Yale be able to pick up my responsibilities in the business we started I wish I had a full page for all the pictures. twenty years ago, while I dedicated myself to accomplishing the goals and objectives that I set out to accomplish on a national television program. I was very fortunate to have Chris Powell, his wife Heidi Powell, my local trainer Mark Quigley and the whole team work with me. And how can I forget the 3 amigos? I was very fortunate to have my buddies Bob and Mehrb for accountability. Where else but this show would a Born Again Christian from Wisconsin, an Iranian from Los Angeles and a Jewish guy from South Jersey become the best of friends? I was so fortunate to have been selected as one of the candidates that would attempt to lose the most weight, decrease body fat significantly and transform my mind and body. I wasn’t going to fail. Failure simply wasn’t an option. I had been here before and this was going to be my last chance to do what I had to do. I could not have accomplished this without an incredible support team, constant motivation, passion and momentum. I recognize that many people will not have this same kind of opportunity, but that isn’t an excuse not to try. There are a number of solid, proven, and healthy ways to take control of your personal transformation. What worked for me may be different than what your journey may end up looking like. Be realistic in setting your goals and work within the environment, resources and support team that you are able to gather to start your journey. Remember, action conquers fear. Never give up, and live everyday with purpose, integrity, commitment, humility and love. I know you can do it. You know you can do it. So go out and do it. 15
To learn more about Mike’s journey, visit www.pickthepounds.com
LEAN: A Journey Toward Business Transformation
Tim Osman “I am passionate about impacting positive change in whatever environment I find myself: My prior career in academia provided ample opportunities to impact thousands of students’ lives, as well as their athletic and career paths. I spent most of my academic career in the gym and on the soccer field, and the balance of it in the principal’s office!” Tim joined OPEX Corporation in 2008 and currently serves as OPEX’s Marketing Manager. Along with a Bachelor of Science degree in education, Tim brings to OPEX a unique blend of creativity, out-of-thebox thinking, leadership ability, product knowledge and sales experience. A Pennsylvania native, Tim currently resides with his family in New Jersey. When not tending to his marketing duties, Tim engages himself in virtually any outdoor activity. He loves indulging in his favorite hobbies of fishing and playing golf (which, Tim has found, you can do at the same time if you hit your ball into a water hazard). “In your quest for ‘Lean’, whether in business or in your personal life, there are changes that you can begin to make right now. With an honest evaluation of your current condition, a solid plan for improvement, and some help and guidance along the way, there’s no telling what positive impact you can make in your own life or the growth your company! I’m excited to be a part of Michael’s journey and to have this opportunity to share some poignant insights on achieving a lean business plan and lifestyle.” Information presented in this book has come from several sources and has been aggregated and modified by Bob Zagami, former Chairman of the AIIM International Board of Directors.
Chapter One: It’s Time to Transform Your Business Process Scanning is the most important aspect of capturing documents and converting them to digital images. This process may be done at a desktop or workgroup scanner, an internal centralized document capture group, or outsourced to a professional document conversion service provider. Our industry is experiencing dramatic growth in all forms of capture. Today, documents can be captured on everything from a smartphone or tablet to a six-figure ultra-high-speed, multi-format scanner that takes up half of the room in which it is housed. Capture is further complicated because it is now possible to scan documents anywhere, anytime and by anyone. Just as Michael Epstein had to transform his mind and body, companies must now reevaluate and transform their business processes to take advantage of advancements in technology for both capture software and the various devices used to scan paper documents. But historically, this industry has operated without change to the process since it switched from capturing documents solely on microfilm to scanning paper and converting information to images and metadata. As a service provider that sells business process improvement software and scanning hardware to your clients, when was the last time you conducted a similar evaluation of your own internal capture and post-processing systems? As Michael notes, “the first step in any transformation process is the realization that something has to change.� In order to determine what and when, one must first conduct an internal evaluation of all current systems. Areas of concern that can be improved must be identified and the necessary modifications made. When was the last time you evaluated your capture processes in your company?
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Chapter Two: Honest Evaluation Michael’s honest evaluation of his condition set him on a journey that would allow him to lose over 200 pounds and transform his mind and body. In a similar fashion, scanning departments should intentionally evaluated their internal operations to identify those areas that can, and should, be changed. A major challenge for today’s service providers and in-house scanning departments is to make changes to current capture processes that appear to be working smoothly. Even if an honest evaluation indicates that improvements can be made, these changes are often avoided because it may interrupt the current capture process. Here are two often overlooked problems that should first be recognized during evaluation: 1. Since the inception of paper scanning, most companies took the same process they used for microfilm and adapted it to the scanning process. Employees would prepare documents for the microfilm camera by removing staples and paper clips, unfolding and flattening documents, and repairing damaged documents with tape or preparing a copy on a nearby office copier. When scanners replaced microfilm cameras, nothing else changed in the business process. 2. Improved technology meant faster scanners – and companies bought them. However, faster scanners required more people to prepare the document to keep up with the speed of these new devices. So companies spent more money to get faster scanners but also had to hire additional laborers. This reduced the profitability of their business because companies seldom raised prices to reflect these added costs. Evaluating the current capture process and overall cost is the best place to begin rethinking how to do business in the future. Understanding the starting point will allow you to set new goals for production, quality, and costs.
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Chapter Three: Set Goals Once the previously unseen business problems are recognized, it is imperative that one is willing to do something about it; that is, set a new direction. Here are some of the areas that should be addressed as you set new long term goals for your business process and short term goals for operational improvement: Document Preparation: Recognize that document prep work will vary by job and client, but is a significant portion of the costs associated with scanning. Employee productivity statistics ought to be retained and evaluated against standard metrics. Examples would include the number of documents prepped per hour/per job and the total cost of running a document preparation department per week/month/year. Scanning: Measure the number of documents are being processed through the scanners per job/per hour. The condition of the documents being scanned greatly affects a typical scanner’s processing capability. Depending on the work you process, throughput statistics on bitonal versus grayscale versus color is also an important item to evaluate. Document Output and Distribution: Depending on client requirements, documents may require re-association after scanning - returning them to their original state. Re-association can be a very expensive process and many companies do not log the time or charge for the service. Quality Control and Inspection: Often, document prep workers prepare documents for scanning too quickly; scanner operators scan documents with little insight into what happens next; and quality control operators get stuck cleaning up the mess - rescanning dog-eared pages and images with streaks across them. It would be beneficial to revisit each department so they are fully aware of the entirety of the scan process. Evaluate if any of these handoffs can be minimized or even eliminated. Post-Processing: Scanned images are presented for manual or automatic data entry or data capture software processing. New advancements in OCR technology, document classification, auto-extraction and other processes can have a big impact if systems are updated. Export and Delivery: How are finalized projects delivered? Are they being packaged and shipped to clients, uploaded to a cloud-based storage and retrieval system, or imported into sophisticated workflows or document management software for knowledge workers? SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time bound) goals can be created and implemented after evaluating your current processes in light of the above improvement areas. Dramatic improvements can be realized to both your business process automation and your bottom line. 3
Chapter Four: Overcome Obstacles to Success The document conversion market is growing as more companies are deciding to convert their paper records to digital image. More organizations are getting into the business of scanning archived records – often a natural extension of their offerings to clients. This increased competition demands more aggressive bids that often result in tighter margins. As a result, every business is looking for ways to squeeze more waste out of the document conversion process and hopefully turn a profit. In addition, the best companies are constantly vying for fresh streams of income and new ways to add to their customer base. In order to be successful in this market, companies need to be resourceful and manage their costs more effectively than their competitors. Here’s the harsh reality: Document prep labor is often the most time-consuming, tedious, and often most expensive component of any scanning job. Most service bureaus perform document prep as a separate step before scanning. Operators touch almost every page because they have to check for staples, paper clips, folded items, and post-it notes. Their goal is to create piles of paper that are clean enough to be auto-fed on their scanners. As needed, pieces are unfolded, flattened, repaired, taped onto larger sheets, and placed into auto-feed ready stacks. The client’s demand for superior image quality, numerous image settings, a multitude of index fields or document separator sheets, and tight service level agreements (SLAs) create a constantly changing work environment. Looming over all of these considerations is the question, “How much labor needs to be applied to this opportunity to meet requirements and still turn a profit?” The question really becomes whether you are willing to allow these obstacles to stand in the way of your success.
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Chapter Five: Build a Stronger Foundation What if you could prep and scan as fast as or faster than your current prep-only rate? There is a better way to handle the widest range of media and reduce or eliminate much of the document prep. It is simply not necessary to constantly tape small or odd-shaped items to full sheets, photocopy folders and fragile pieces, or manually flatten sheets before scanning. What if most separator sheets could be eliminated, or easily reused? There is a better way to handle document separation. Most separator sheets can be eliminated by using the physical characteristics of a piece or by deploying electronic intervention, based on the requirements of each project, in line with the scanning process. Generic separator sheets are easily re-used by automatically outsorting them. What if image quality could be improved, image capture settings adjusted on the fly, and re-scans decreased by optimizing exception items during scanning? There is a better way. By defining page types via software, operators can apply different settings on each image (i.e. “snippets”), and capture them quickly and easily. OPEX Corporation understands efficiency. Over the years, they have developed innovative products that address the root causes of the workflow issues their customers face. OPEX strives to understand and solve those issues by designing the best products to meet those challenges rather than simply addressing the symptoms. As a result of these efforts, OPEX offers various scanner models that provide you with a stronger foundation on which to build new business opportunities and the flexibility to: • Identify and aggressively compete for projects with more challenging paper, or more recurring-revenue transactional work • Decrease prep headcount, or increase output using the same number of people • Increase your profit margin
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Chapter Six: Compete How fast a scanner feeds paper doesn’t really tell the whole story. If you only looked at the scanner’s ability to quickly scan documents, you might surmise that a scanner twice as fast would be twice as successful in a head to head competition. While this may sound logical at first pass, if one digs a little deeper you will find the devil is in the details. And in the case of document scanning…the devil is document prep. Document prep refers to that necessary process of making paper documents ready to run through a scanner. Technology has changed, rendering document prep the biggest weakness in the scanning process. In order to compete, do you really need to have a separate preparation step when capturing documents for clients? Several years ago when developing new document capture platforms for outsourcing service providers, OPEX identified over 20 different types of prep activities that weaken the scanning process. For example: picture a prepper sitting near a photocopier, surrounded by rolls and rolls of Scotch tape, with blank 8.5 x 11 sheets of paper and patch sheets in hand. Thus begins the tedious process of removing staples and paperclips, taping torn documents, photocopying delicate or raggedy pages, securing small or odd shaped pages onto larger ones, unfolding and removing creases from pages, inserting document separators, etc. In addition to these steps, there are a number of other activities dedicated to making the paper easier to feed into a high-speed scanner. This time-consuming and monotonous process is an industry weakness that has been widely accepted as simply the cost of doing business. We’ve heard directly from our customers time and again who verify industry reports that document prep labor accounts for upwards of 70% of the cost of document scanning. Every major scanner manufacturer will admit that document preparation kills profits. OPEX can provide the edge to help you beat this accepted norm and compete at a new level.
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Chapter Seven: Enjoy the Small Victories If you are in the market for a new scanner and happen to be evaluating a high-priced 6000 DPH (documents per hour) scanner, consider this: it doesn’t really matter how fast it can scan, it matters how long that scanner operator has to wait for the work to be prepped. It matters how many hours of front-end labor are required to feed the high-speed scanner. On average, an experienced document prepper can prep a box of files and documents between 750 and 1000 docs per hour. Efficient document scanning operations, it should be noted, have squeezed as much time as they can out of the process by eliminating a second here, a couple seconds there. In a box of 2,500 to 3,000 documents, those seconds can really add up, and the effort is commendable. But what if it were possible achieve additional victories in your quest to cut out even more time from the prep process? What if you could prep and scan in half the time it takes you to prep? What if you could eliminate photocopying a torn document? What if you didn’t have to tape small documents to full-page sheets? What if the file folder could be scanned with the resulting image including the important tab information from the folder? What if you could scan that wrinkled or creased document with no shadowing on the image? What if you could prep and scan in 2 hours 30 minutes that which you would typically spend 4 hours prepping? OPEX focuses on small victories by combining steps and eliminating as much prep as possible. These small victories result in a cumulative WIN for your overall process. OPEX scanners deal with paper as it is presented, right out of the file folder. These scanners are designed to deal directly with the root cause of your prep problem. OPEX scanners significantly reduce labor-intensive document prep and can increase the efficiency of your operation – up to a 300% to 400% increase in productivity. That’s a victory worth enjoying.
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Chapter Eight: Participate, Don’t Spectate The document conversion services marketplace is in the midst of dramatic change. There are an increasing number of document scanning jobs to be won; but there are also increased participants - the competition, who make it more challenging to win the business. Can service bureaus really thrive in this economy? A business that fails to actively participate in the midst of these changes could be reduced to spectatorship. The result is an inability to effectively compete for future scanning and document capture projects. OPEX business process analysts have immersed themselves in the service bureau market for several years. They have visited numerous service bureaus, assessed their operations and interviewed their executives. This research has helped OPEX better understand the current state of the service bureau market and suggest ways that these companies can increase their efficiency and profitability. OPEX has identified two major concerns: 1. Backfile conversion projects are finite. These projects have a definitive end date. Once the job is done, it’s done. The document conversion service provider must continuously find and then win new projects in order to cover their costs and keep their lights on. 2. Increased competition is squeezing profit margins. What once could be charged for separately now is an expected inclusion in the bid. With limited information about the complexity of a project, it is often safer to bid high to ensure profitability and risk losing the project than it is to lower their price just to beat the competition. These scenarios present a significant challenge for the service provider. The research indicates that in order to thrive service companies must increase their sales and marketing budgets in order to better identify and win new business. They must adopt technology that drives out the high cost of labor. Or they can continue to risk taking less profit for each job or simply sit on the sidelines and watch.
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Chapter Nine: Face Mortality Survival is a holistic transformation process – it can’t be driven by a single tactic or objective. It is a combination of events that bring you to the point of realization that you have to change something NOW or lose your business. Recent statistics show that some service providers have struggled in recent years. Others have succumbed to their mortality, selling out to larger aggregators, getting out of the business altogether. Here are three strategies to face your company’s mortality and come away stronger: 1. Protect margins by reducing document prep labor. The most costly and timeconsuming aspect of document conversion services is document prep. When analyzing operations OPEX looks for ways to streamline your processes and eliminate unnecessary steps. 2. Bid on jobs that are more complex: messy paper, significant variation in paper sizes, remote scanning, high document security, or high image quality requirements. These jobs are often avoided because of the difficulty to perform them efficiently. With the right tools and a reliable prep and scan productivity rate, you can bid competitively and still earn a reasonable return for your risk. Some service bureaus have carved out a niche for themselves becoming very efficient at processing these messy jobs. 3. Offer hosted cloud storage services. Many storage vendors have made it easy for service bureaus to make decent recurring revenues via a hosted cloud storage offering. Cloud storage enables your business to not only create document images for a client, but also charge the client a monthly fee for storing this information for them in the cloud. The payback is significant on these types of services.
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Chapter Ten: Face Reality, Become Stronger Document conversion services have depended on scanning archives as their main source of revenue. Face it, everybody iss doing it. So how can you become indispensable to your customers? You can add transactional, day forward processing. Currently, bureaus are scanning items out of folders after all processing has been completed. Why not help customers scan the documents out of the envelope as they are received, permitting the customer to “process from image”? This recurring revenue work will provide more stable cash flow, can help cover fixed costs, and reduce the anxiety of where the next job is coming from. Focusing more on transactional processing will help transition them from being a service bureau to a Business Process Outsourcing company. Providing an in-depth knowledge of the customer’s business process will make it difficult for the customer to switch providers; they would need to train a completely new staff on how to do things. In addition, you would no longer be simply providing customers with images and data. Instead, you would be providing intelligence to them and the ability to make better decisions faster. That is very valuable. The key challenge is demonstrating to customers the improved cost savings and data security by outsourcing rather than keeping the process in-house. A study by Bain and Company showed that it costs six times more to acquire a new customer than to sell additional services to existing customers. Your company can process your customer’s accounts payables, expense reports, or employment applications. For those serving specific markets like education, mortgage and insurance there are student enrollment, mortgage application, and insurance claim scanning and business process opportunities. A second challenge is proving you can efficiently and securely open envelopes, extract all their contents, and scan them. This is best accomplished using a tool that combines envelope opening, extraction and scanning in one step. In addition, you need to optimize these images for data extraction. Your customers are going to perform some transaction from these images, so they should be optimized for machine readability. Face the reality of what could be and become stronger by investing in the right tools to grow your business. 10
Chapter Eleven: A New Paradigm OPEX scanning workstations are uniquely designed to reduce prep and rescans right at the scanner. Everything is centered on the highest total throughput — prep and scan — with the lowest labor cost. In most cases, combining prepping and scanning into one step is the most efficient process. For example, OPEX scanners use an edge-aligned feeder that accepts a wide range of paper: small receipts, large envelopes, wrinkled pages, file folders with metal clasps, sheets with staples, and damaged or torn documents. This eliminates taping small items, photocopying, and carefully placing pages into stacks. Even though each of those actions may seem insignificant in and of themselves, they add up over time. Almost every piece of paper placed in a scanner has to be scanned using one set of image capture settings. Applying the same image capture settings to documents results in some images of poor quality. This is typically caught in the QC (quality control) process — and many of those images are going to end up being rescanned. OPEX scanners offer enhancements to optimize image quality, even integrating advance recognition and classification technology. During scan time, different page types can be identified and different capture settings, image cleanup profiles, and image enhancement profiles can be applied on a per image basis. This permits the scanner operator to get good images of all page types, which significantly cuts down the number of rescans that would otherwise occur. It is very common for prep and scan throughput to increase significantly. Instead of having six people doing document prep and three people running scanners, a total of four people can prep and scan at the scanners. This creates significant cost savings in labor which leads to more consistent and reliable productivity rates. Projects will be profitable and your bids will be competitive. These are just a few of the ways in which OPEX is helping our customers stay ahead of the competition, expand business offerings, and thrive in today’s economy. There is a new standard in the document scanning process.
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Chapter Twelve: T he Secret to Success: People, Process, Products What differentiates OPEX from many of their competitors in the capture marketplace over and above the fact that their products are made in the United States? The driving force is simple. It is the value they place on their People, Process, and Products. This value must be part of the corporate culture and reflected in everything a company does from product conception to delivery - from purchase order to support and service after the sale. This is the secret to the success at OPEX Corporation: they understand, appreciate, and implement these three words in every business decision. You can’t have an effective manufacturing process without some human intervention. OPEX has an incredible team of dedicated and qualified individuals in every department of the company, from the shipping docks to the executive suite. The individuals on the manufacturing floor at OPEX are an integral part of a successful ecosystem. It is often their experienced eye or instinct that leads to product improvements that enhance the user experience or cost savings through a more efficient manufacturing process. Once the people are in place, it is critical to have a process that will deliver quality products, on time, and at fair prices. That task is not as easy as it may sound. Virtually everything associated with the manufacturing of OPEX’s document scanners is designed and produced within the campus buildings located in Moorestown, NJ. Every person from the account manager that sold it, the people who built it, the engineers that installed it and the professional technicians that service it after the sale are all employees of OPEX. This is almost unheard of in our industry today. And they manufacture products that work… for you and your company. Scanners play a critical role when moving information from paper and delivering data and images that allow business process automation improvements that deliver value to clients or in-house consumers of the finished product. Isn’t it in your best interest to look at companies that are responsible for every step in the manufacturing, sales, support and administration of the scanner you purchase from them?
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Chapter Thirteen: Part of Your Team Most service bureaus perform document prep as a separate step before scanning. They touch every single page because they have to check for staples, paper clips, folds, and post-it notes. They create piles of paper that need to be clean enough to auto-feed on their scanner. With OPEX scanners as a part of your team, you can virtually eliminate this separate prep step. If during the prep stage every page is touched anyway, why place the page on a pile to be scanned later when it can be dropped on a conveyor and scanned immediately? By defining page types, OPEX CertainScan software permits operators to apply different settings for each image captured. Other scanners must apply the same image capture settings and the same image cleanup profile to the entire stack in the feeder. Wouldn’t you rather have a team member with whom you could improve image quality and decrease re-scans by optimizing exception items during scanning? As a part of your team, OPEX scanners provide the widest range of document separation methods. This allows operators to select the most efficient method of separation based on the requirements of each project. How much money would you save annually if you eliminated most of your separator sheets, photocopying, and taping? OPEX is a team player uniquely positioned to provide the service provider decision-makers with attractive business opportunities and flexibility based on their company’s goals. Companies may pursue projects with more challenging paper or win more recurring-revenue transactional work. With OPEX on your team, you can decrease prep headcount or take on more work with the same number of people. OPEX scanners make it possible for service bureaus to realize increased profit margins and submit more competitive bids to win new business.
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Chapter Fourteen: Momentum OPEX began in 1973 with a simple question: “How can we help our customers open mail more efficiently?” From those humble origins, OPEX has evolved into a global corporation that delivers workflow excellence and process improvements that span from the mailroom to the warehouse. Every product made and every innovation developed is designed to increase the customers’ productivity, improve accuracy, and deliver significant cost advantages. What began with mail opening and extracting has grown to include document processing and material handling – everything from individual, single-piece items ranging in size from envelopes, documents and checks all the way through 60-pound payloads. Over the years, OPEX has developed innovative products that address the root causes of workflow issues their customers face. They strive to understand and solve those issues by designing the best products to meet those challenges rather than simply addressing the symptoms. This market-driven approach, coupled with unparalleled service and excellent ROI, form the backbone of their long-term customer relationships. They also continue to look for ways to team with third-party integrators and software vendors to provide their clients with complete solutions. That same impetus continues today. After close to 40 years, they have learned much from their experiences and their customers. With a solid core of expert engineers, process and product specialists, a vast service organization, research and development staff, and a dedication to listening and responding to their customers’ needs, OPEX makes it their mission to design and build the very best workflow solutions and stand by them with unmatched customer service. As a global technology leader, OPEX is uniquely positioned to meet the challenges that their customers face in the document imaging, mail automation, and material handling industries. So with all of these years of forward momentum, what is OPEX’s goal in all of this? “Simply to help you achieve the efficiency and accuracy required to compete in this global marketplace. We strive to accomplish that goal every day by proving ourselves in the most demanding applications. At the end of the day, it is good to know that we have succeeded in helping our customers, like you, achieve their goals.”
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Chapter Fifteen: Be Realistic, It Is Not for Everybody Customers have many options today when it comes to meeting their scanning requirements. They also have different types of projects with a myriad of document types, sizes and colors. It is impossible for one type of scanner, or one manufacturer, to successfully meet every circumstance a service provider will encounter today. Appreciating the OPEX difference will often be a learning process because the document conversion industry has done things one way for so many years that it is very easy for companies to say, “This is the way we have always done it.” However, the very nature of a service provider’s business – especially if you are selling related hardware and document management software products – is to show your clients how to lower their costs and increase their bottom line profits. Unfortunately, many service providers don’t have the luxury of investigating new ways of doing business so they simply stay with what they already know and what they are doing today. Nobody is going to replace all their scanners with OPEX scanners at the same time. However, the next time you are in the market for a new scanner, it would be an excellent time to take a step back and analyze your business operations, especially your document preparation, scanning and post-processing departments. However, with the immediate labor savings that can be realized using OPEX scanning hardware, it is likely the only scanner you would buy when you are NOT in the market to purchase a scanner. Ask OPEX for an in-house demonstration so that you can evaluate their prep and scan process against your current way of doing business: Run the same jobs on your current scanner that incorporates your existing document preparation methodology. Then take a comparable batch of documents that have not been prepped and run them through the OPEX scanner using their prep and scan methodology. In most cases you will clearly see the difference and will be able to calculate your return on investment in real dollars and labor savings. This will provide the all the information and justification you will need to start a replacement program to add OPEX scanners to your document scanning operation.
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For more information or to learn more about OPEX products, visit us at opex.com