One of the many challenges of running a fulfillment company involves handling change. It’s important to make sure that as people change (both ESP and client employees), that the policies and procedures stay the same. And it’s important to have such policies and procedures well-documented and firmly in place for when new clients sign up.

To that end, one of our main goals of 2005 was to document policies, procedures and practices, both old and new. With our renewed interest in documentation, it proved easy to document the new tools we’ve developed in 2005.

If you log onto ESPonDemand, you’ll see extensive documentation available for the match tool and the group administration tool. But we also went back to document all other ESPonDemand tools and all of our standard reports. After that, we even created a Circulator FAQ, just to catch anything else that wasn’t previously noted.

All of our work proved particularly useful as we saw many new clients in 2005. The move from one fulfillment company to another is often cushioned when the new fulfillment company is ready and able to answer the inevitable flurry of questions that follows a conversion.

This month’s issue talks about some of our new clients and their conversion experiences. It also drills deeper into report documentation. For those looking for a shortcut through ESP’s reports and services, we offer our rather subjective ranking and summary of our 10 best circulation tools.

In 2006, we look forward to continued growth, the development of new tools, and a few of those unsuspected hurdles that make this business so challenging. No matter what may befall us in the new year, you can bet we’ll be documenting as we go.

Jack Miller