No worries! Check out the transcript and recording of The Next Generation of Document Generation here. Moderated by Kevin Craine of Craine Communications Group, the webinar features Andy Nadeau of McKesson Medical-Surgical and Mike Badeaux and Kerry Dieaz of Mele Printing presenting case studies of DocOrigin use in both companies. Watch the complete presentation here, or read on for the entire transcript, below.
Chad: Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Chad Henk, Marketing Director for Xplor International. On behalf of Xplor and Eclipse Corporation, I want to welcome you all to today’s broadcast of “The Next Generation of Document Generation.”
Before we begin, I want to share a few tips with you. (Chad goes on to explain how to use the webinar set up.)
Now, I’d like to introduce Kevin Craine, Executive Producer at Craine Communications Group who’s going to be representing Eclipse Corporation today. So Kevin, the show is yours.
Kevin: Hi, Chad. Thank you so much. It’s my pleasure to moderate this discussion today because Eclipse Corporation are experts in designing and implementing next generation document generation solutions. Their flagship software DocOrigin is innovative and an intuitive approach to generating business correspondence. And as we’ll see today, no matter what industry you’re in and whether you need to produce large volumes of transactional documents or just a single customer letter, DocOrigin can handle it quickly and easily and affordably. And DocOrigin also allows us to leverage data generated by older legacy printed mail systems right alongside modern enterprise content management systems and other lines of business applications without the need for highly customized coding or advanced IT supports.
These are the reasons I’m excited to be here today, and just a few of the reasons that companies in varied and diverse industries have selected DocOrigin. And we have two of those customer organizations represented here today, Mele Printing and McKesson Medical-Surgical. We’ll be starting today with Mike Badeaux, Senior Applications Developer at Mele Printing. He’ll be joined also by Kerry Diez. Kerry’s also in application development and sales at Mele.
Mele Printing has been using DocOrigin in a number of interesting ways, better driving rate of speed and leveraging the advanced features from their equipment, and they’re integrating this system with other tools to help reduce postage cost and improve delivery. So we’ll be hearing from Mike and Kerry in just a few minutes about that, just a moment or so.
Also in this session is Andy Nadeau from McKesson Medical-Surgical. Andy is a senior programmer analyst in McKesson and they’ve been using DocOrigin since 2015. And the results have been impressive. They’ve turned around their processing time from days and hours to minutes for critical applications like packing slips, and they’ve got a more integrated solution for printing mail using DocOrigin. So we’ll talk about that with Andy Nadeau in the second half.
And we’ll have some questions and answers at the end of the session, so please save your ideas and questions for then. But for now, I think we should just let…get going and introduce our first guest today, Mike Badeaux and Kerry Diaz from Mele Printing. Hello, guys.
Mike: Hey, guys. How y’all doing?
Kerry: Hey, how are you?
Kevin: Now, Mele Printing is a commercial print service provider in Louisiana. They’ve been using DocOrigin since 2013 and have continued to expand on the use of the software. And in 2016, Mele became the first company to put the Pitney Bowes Accelejet into production. As we know, the Accelejet is a state-of-the-art production printer designed for complex documents and forms and DocOrigin drives that Accelejet, helping to get full-rated speed while taking advantage of the high resolution and advanced features. I want to ask you folks about that.
Mike, you’ve been using DocOrigin for a number of years now, in particular, to expand your use and the ROI of the Accelejet. What brought about these changes?
Kerry: This is Kerry, with Mele.
Kevin: Hey, Kerry.
Kerry: A little bit of history, I came to Mele Printing in 2013 from a company that had about 50 or 60 applications that were actually written in COBOL and RPG2, so we needed something quicker, both on the processing end and the printing end. And we definitely have found both of those as needed. We needed the ability to convert systems really quickly, obviously, because we were in a crunch to get all the 50 or 60 applications converted fairly timely while they continue to run on the older system. We want to do that quickly and we did through DocOrigin’s FilterEditor product. It’s amazing. The data mapping is really quick, really simple, easy to use. And then DocOrigin’s Design product, it makes it really quick and easy to design a form and get an application up and running.
So the speed of the DocOrigin product match well with the speed of the Accelejet bringing my old company into a whole new world that our customers certainly enjoy because of turnaround times.
Kevin: Kerry, you mentioned… I’m sorry, Mike. Go ahead.
Mike: I was just going to add that I think the other change that we have seen is over the last few years, the transactional printing industry has just changed. It used to be that a black and white statement was enough. You’re just reporting facts to the members. Now, what they’re demanding is they want to see color. They want to see full color. They want to see… Our customers want those statements to be a profit center. So we’re going to put full-color ads on these statements now and advertise their products. And that’s changing the industry.
Kevin: So with the FilterEditor and the ability to add color and more advanced features, DocOrigin really took you to the next level, because what? In the old days, that would have taken a lot of coding and a lot of effort, correct?
Mike: A huge amount of coding and a lot of effort. Now, it’s a much easier tool to use.
Kevin: So I understand a substantial amount of your business is with credit unions, and one of the benefits that you’ve seen to using DocOrigin is to create a single template that you now use for what, 80 different, unique customers? Is that right? Can you tell me a little bit more about that and what the results have been?
Kerry: Yeah, we’re…maybe it’s about 80 credit unions that run on the same form now.
They come out of about 21 different core systems, so there’s a frontend that needs to be written for each one of them, but as far as the form itself goes, all 80 are on the same form and it’s gotten really good results. All of our clients really like the look of it and the feel of it and they like, again, they like the speed that we’re able to process their files and get their member statements in the mail. And we’re adding new credit unions every year now. So there’s always a need there.
The unique thing that we’ve done is we’ve taken the member’s share statement, their Visa statement, if there is one, and possibly even a tax statement at the end of the year, we merge them all into one envelope and send that one envelope to the member so that it looks like one statement to them. And that’s important to the member and it’s important to our client because you begin to save postage for our client and the member gets everything in one envelope, so it’s been really good for us in that regard.
Kevin: So you’ve mentioned speed a couple of times. Can you tell me a little bit more? What kind of speed increase have you seen?
Kerry: Well, from where I came from, from my former company, we’ve doubled our printing speed and I don’t even know… The processing time has gone from…literally from hours to process some of our larger credit unions to minutes processing that same credit union on the DocOrigin system. It’s literally been that much of an improvement.
Kevin: So it’s a bunch quicker, is what you’re saying. And then you’re also able to do things that it would have taken forever to physically do before in terms of adding color and making the documents look awesome and comingling them and bring them all together in ways that are much more flexible. That was something that you weren’t able to do before?
Kerry: Well, we were able to do it in a very time-consuming fashion. Simply to lay things on the page in certain places required a lot of code on my old system compared to now where it’s easy to just drop something in a position or a page and it’s just that quick.
Kevin: And what about the ROI on the Accelejet? You’ve got this Accelejet. It can’t sit idle and it can’s sit there running with some suboptimal feature set. So how did DocOrigin bring all of that out?
Mike: Well, the nice thing about the Accelejet is they basically are a PDF printer, it’s an inkjet system. That’s what it really is. It’s just like what you would have on your desk, but this is a much larger, obviously, based on the picture you see, it’s so much larger, high volume. DocOrigin, one of its native outputs is PDF so we’re able to just create this PDF and jump it right on to the Accelejet and it runs it at rated speed. It runs at about probably in the neighborhood of 200 pages a minute, front and back, color, with very, very high output. I mean, very high quality.
Kevin: Now, I know that you are also, at Mele, a customer of BCC Software and you have integrated BCC and DocOrigin. Can you tell me a bit about that? What have been the results?
Mike: Well, that’s working perfectly. One of the nice things DocOrigin allows us to create a file, basically a name and address file that we can seamlessly import into BCC’s Mail Manager automated process. You get everything pre-sorted. It outputs back into our DocOrigin system and we’re able send the statements out pre-sorted, which obviously, saves customers money, and that’s the end game. That’s what the customers are looking for, to save money. But everything’s completely seamless, completely automated, no human interaction at all, so it is working perfectly. We’re really excited with that product.
Kevin: So your customers are saving money. How is Mele making money, more money? Or what have been the results financially for the organization?
Kerry: Financially, it’s actually done very well. We’re able to…one of the things that we started doing just a few years ago, and going way back, the way pricing structure used to be was you would pay one price for the first page and then maybe a little bit less cost for a second, third, fourth page. We started kind of offering a one price pays all, basically. So much per statement, as opposed to so much per page. Kind of helped out a lot with customers’ invoicing. They didn’t have to sit there and try to figure out, “Okay, how much did I pay for this? How much did I pay for that?” They know right up front, it’s going to be X amount per statement. So they take their number of statements, multiply that by the cost and they know right up front what their cost is gonna be. It’s uh, cost per statement has done a great job for us.
Kevin: That’s interesting. I’ve never heard of that approach, cost per statement. So it doesn’t matter whether it’s a 1-page or a 1-image statement or a 10-image statement. It’s the same flat price for me?
Kerry: Yes. That’s correct.
Kevin: That’s cool.
Kerry: And it’s done a tremendous job for our customers. They just love it. And it does good for us, because we’re trying to make it simple. We understand where everybody is with these things. We understand that the time is money and people trying to fill out invoices, that’s just wasting time.
Kevin: I see. Okay, I’d like to talk to you more about how all that works, but that’s an intriguing approach. And so you feel that that…that sort of brings a different sort of mentality to transactional document production as opposed to…that’s more in line, say, with commercial printing than we might expect.
Kerry: Yeah. And we really started off as a commercial printer, so that’s kind of where everything’s kind of been generated from, and it so far…what worked well.
Kevin: All right. Oh, well, okay. I want to shift gears a little bit. Why did you folks select DocOrigin versus all the other options available out there?
Mike: Well, to be perfectly honest, in 2012, as Kerry had said a few moments ago, we had quite a lot of systems that were written in COVOL and Visual Basic and we were just looking to modernize. We knew that the industry was changing, that we needed to keep up with the technology. And we had talked to, back in 2012, we had several conference calls with all the big names, everybody knows some of the bigger names in these tools, just to kind of get an idea of what was out there.
In the spring of 2013, as a matter of fact, my boss and I went to the Xplor Conference in Orlando with the express purpose of looking at the different tools that were available for document printing. We went for two days. The very first day, we spent quite a lot of time with some of the bigger, more well-known tools out there, several live demos, just spent the whole day with these guys. And they were all great products, but the price point was always a sticking point. They were a little bit higher than what we were looking to get involved in.
The second day, the day we were actually gonna be leaving, we decided we were just gonna go hit some of the other booths, just to see what other products were out there, just to… We’re always looking to upgrade software, upgrade equipment. And we actually came across the DocOrigin group and I believe, Steve, I think you were in the booth that day, and just asked, “Okay, what is your product, what do you do?” And he began to show us this design tool that just intrigued us.
And so we left, came back to the office, had a few more phone calls with the DocOrigin guys, and six months later, we had the product and were converting our systems.
Kevin: Now, Mike, what about that design tool was so intriguing?
Mike: I think it was the ease of use, the simplicity that we were looking at, and of course, we were just looking at a demo at the time. And as Kerry had said a little bit ago, their FilterEditor tool, just as a programmer, when I saw that tool and how easy it was to grab data from one place and drop it into another, it just really intrigued me, really excited me.
Kevin: The next generation, right? Next generation approach.
Mike: Absolutely. Now, if you had told me that prior to that day, if you would have told me that there was a tool that did that, I would have laughed at you. I wouldn’t know that something exists.
Kevin: So you didn’t’ find any other tool that had a similar capability?
Mike: I did not. Everything was…I guess, you we were still writing some code to grab this section of data and move it over here. But the FilterEditor just gave a much easier approach to it.
Kevin: Now, would you recommend DocOrigin to a colleague at another company?
Mike: Absolutely, in a heartbeat. In fact, we’ve already done that. We’ve done it several times.
Kevin: And how is it working with the folks at DocOrigin?
Kerry: I would honestly say that we’ve challenge the product with some of the forms we’ve had to design for our clients and it’s met every challenge we put on that. You know, the product itself, the staff that we deal with, they’re amazing. They always have the answers we’re looking for. It’s really been a good deal for us.
Mike: Absolutely.
Kevin: Kerry, can you give us an example of one of those challenges that you threw at it?
Kerry: Well, the biggest challenge was the credit union form that we designed, because there’s, as you can imagine, there’s a lot to it. We’re taking, in one instance, one of our credit unions is sending us multiple types of data streams. They’re sending us print-image form, file, they’re sending us XML files and data files. We’re having to take all of those print streams or data streams, put them together, and create that one form, that one piece that goes into the envelope to go to the member. The member sees a nice pretty statement that makes sense to them, everything there that they need, but the work to get it there, for us, it was a challenge. But like I said, the product met that challenge head-on and produced a great result.
Kevin: All right. Well, Mike and Kerry, we’re almost out of time. It’s been great speaking with you today. But before I let you go, one last question, what advice do you have for other organizations, our listeners today, that may be attempting something similar?
Mike: I guess a few things. The very first thing I would say is understand that going into it, that converting to a new software is gonna take time. There’s a learning curve involved, obviously, but you’re taking systems that have been in place previously and trying to mimic that in a whole new way. It takes time. In fact, it took us nearly three years to do a complete conversion of all of our systems.
I think the second thing is that you want to make sure that you decide the plan for what you’re trying to accomplish. Yeah, this is the time that you would…if you’re looking to create new workflows or new systems, this is the time to do it, while you’re having to rewrite everything in the first place.
And then I guess the third thing that I would…and probably the most important is definitely lean on the DocOrigin guys. Their technical and support guys are extremely knowledgeable, not only on their product, but just in general, in ways of how to accomplish your goals. We lean on them quite a lot. We would just explain, “Hey, we’re trying to get here,” and those guys always had a solution for us. So lean on those guys heavily.
Kevin: Well, all right. That is Mike Badeaux and Kerry Diez from Mele Printing. Mike, Kerry, thank you so much for being our guest today.
Mike: Thank you, guys. I appreciate it.
Kerry: Thank you.
Kevin: All right, very good. Well, let’s move on. And hear from Andy Nadeau from McKesson Medical-Surgical. And Andy is a senior program analyst in McKesson. And McKesson Medical-Surgical is part of the McKesson healthcare organization, the oldest and largest healthcare services company in the nation. In fact, McKesson plays an integral role in the healthcare of millions of Americans. They serve more than 50% of American hospitals, 100% of American health plans and are the largest pharmaceutical distributor in North America so you can imagine document generation systems play a critical role in the performance of the organization. And when McKesson needed to migrate a large number of critical forms to a next generation platform, they chose DocOrigin.
So we’ve asked Andy to join us today, to talk about that migration, and their experience with DocOrigin. Andy, welcome to the webcast.
Andy: Thank you. It’s nice to be here.
Kevin: Thank you for being with us. Now, you folks needed to replace three different products, one of them apparently being Adobe JetForm Central that were running in your enterprise. Can you tell us a little bit about that? The need to consolidate and what was the impact of having those multiple systems in your operations?
Andy: The biggest thing, the biggest concern we had with the multiple systems was we had to have multiple people with different skill sets to try and keep everything maintained and not running optimally. And as we were growing, we were starting to outgrow these other products. We were having some issues with our environment, our platform. Systems weren’t being able to keep up. We were starting to fall behind on document production and it was impacting our distribution. So we needed to scale things up and allow our business to grow and not impact, you know, something as…not impact our distribution which is our biggest commodity.
Kevin: So it sounds like some of the similar issues that we just heard from Mele – speed and support.
Andy: Definitely, definitely. We were taxing our main enterprise system in that, and it was penalizing our warehouses, so we needed to come up with something that would allow us to offload the work from our enterprise server onto a more versatile and updated system.
Kevin: Now, I want to ask you about packing slips. I understand that one of the big applications you are using DocOrigin for is to improve the packing slip process. Can you describe that? What’s the condition before and what were the results after you adopted DocOrigin?
Andy: Before we adopted DocOrigin, we were running on an iSeries system with JetForm and what was…we were encountering a single threaded bottleneck, if you will. We operate 30-some warehouses across the country. And it meant that we were trying to funnel all of their load through that one…that bottleneck, if you will. So we were at times falling behind in being able to get to a document and get it prepared and try to get it back to the distribution center. At that point, we decided we needed to come up with something. And we started our search to try and get a product that would give us the ability to scale very quickly and allow our business to continue to grow.
Kevin: You were falling behind. Tell me a little bit more. How far behind were you getting?
Andy: We could, at times, get to be an hour to an hour and a half behind so you can imagine conveyor systems in warehouses that are waiting for…you know, product waiting for packing slips to be sent back. Needless to say, we had some customers that were not very happy with us.
Kevin: No sense of humor, yes.
Andy: No sense of humor. Not when they would send us pictures of their product laying all over the floor. So we needed to get something that helped to alleviate that pain.
Kevin: And now, you’re using DocOrigin. What are the results that you’re way behind before, how fast are you now?
Andy: Right now, I would say that from the time we get a request to generate a package slip to the time to send it back, that has to go full circle. That comes from the distribution center up to our centralized enterprise server, we farm it out to some Windows servers to do the actual production, get it back to the warehouse in about 10 seconds for a single document. So we have dramatically improved our performance. We have some very happy customers now as opposed to a couple of years ago.
Kevin: So the ROI, at least on that aspect of it was so quick you probably didn’t need to calculate it.
Andy: Correct. Once we started our journey with this product, it went very well.
Kevin: Now, Andy, since your initial adoption of DocOrigin, you folks have also moved on to expand the use of the software to include things like customer and account statements, which you then send to an outsource provider for print and mail. Can you tell us a little bit more about that process and what role DocOrigin has played in improving your statement production?
Andy: Sure. The way we generate our statements is we generate the raw statement, if you will, out of our ERP system, in a format that DocOrigin is able to accept. We take that XML file, if you will, and we, using DocOrigin, we will do the formatting of the statement created as a PDF. We take a copy of that PDF, and we will outsource it to the printer for printing. We will also take a copy of the PDF and send it to our imaging system. We keep a copy for accessibility to our customers in our imaging system for 12 years, for regulatory requirements. And so it serves a dual purpose. We’re able to not only generate the PDF, we also can send a mailing file, a text file with all of the appropriate mailing information, some instructions to that printer, to say, you know, whether this document requires some form of insert, if we’re doing an insert for the customer, and all of that information. We also will send to the printer some audit information that we expect to have returned to us.
So what we will do is the ERP system will say that there were…if, say, a thousand documents being generated, will send that down…that information down to DocOrigin. DocOrigin will calculate how many documents will actually be printed, how many will be emailed or faxed, whatever distribution method we have. And then we tell the printer, “Okay, you tell us how many documents you received and processed and then we can do a full circle audit on the documents, to ensure that what left the ERP system and through all of the different distributions will come back and we will end up with a complete picture of all of the documents, where they went and ensure they were all delivered on time.
Kevin: Wow. Okay, Andy, let me unpack that a little bit. I’m learning a lot here. So what you’re saying to me is that you’re using DocOrigin not only for really cool, like, mailing system, in other words, interacting with your outsource provider and packing it down into a PDF and doing those types of things that you maybe would expect or hope to have, but it’s also interacting with your ERP system or other database systems, and also being used as an engine to populate your archive and then helps you with the actual information governance of that, of all of that, not only the archive but also the print and mail process, you know, for audit and compliance purposes. So am I getting all of that right? That’s a lot, right?
Andy: That is, that is.
Kevin: It seems a lot.
Andy: It is a lot. And we do it…
Kevin: A lot of good.
Andy: A lot of good. It gives us a lot of good. It takes away…it has helped us eliminate the need for an individual to manually track documents from the ERP system. We used to lose documents, and we wouldn’t know about it until somebody called and complained or looking for the document. Now, with all of these touch points being able to talk to each other, through DocOrigin or whatever other mechanisms, we’re now able to say we generated a thousand documents, and we know that a thousand documents got to where they should have gone. And it’s seamless.
We don’t have an individual doing it. We have a background system that does the check on…a couple of times a day. And if there is any difference, the support team will get a notification.
Kevin: All right, again, another reason to say next generation document generation, because it’s beyond what we’re accustomed to.
Andy: That’s right. Correct.
Kevin: Now, before I leave the subject of your outsource provider, I also wanna ask a little bit about your relationship with that provider. How does DocOrigin make that relationship better?
Andy: The way it’s helped us is it’s…enabled us to give the printer the documents in exactly the format that they need, provides them with a, like I say, a mailing list report that they can check against to ensure that they have all of the documents based on that mailing list. And again, like I say, it allows us to be able to pass them information to communicate back to us to ensure that we are auditing all of our documents and they’re all being dealt with accordingly.
Kevin: And they love that because they can prove that their, you know, process is in order, they can verify and audit that as well.
Andy: Correct, correct. We get notification very quickly, you know, particularly if there’s a transmission or something that gets missed, we know, because we expect to have those audit confirmations returned to us in a timely manner. And if we don’t see them, then we start getting a review.
Kevin: Now, I was talking with Gary about your account a while back and he mentioned some other things that you’re doing or have done in converting a number of sub-forms, 114 different sub-forms? Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Andy: Yeah, that would be in our packing slip process.
Kevin: That’s a lot.
Andy: Because we’re a distributor for medical supplies, we have many customers that we ship on behalf of, and they like certain pieces of information that make the document…they ask us to make the document look like it came from them. So we’re able to do that based on just pieces of information that we harvest out of the ERP report that generates the packing slip and we can make the document look completely different. We can have very specific document for customers if that’s what they want. Or as Mike and Kerry were saying, they have a stock form that they will use for different customers in different credit unions, you know, making it look like it’s theirs. We have a similar concept with our packing slips when we ship for some of our customers to their recipients.
So we were able to take all of that with the help of the folks from Eclipse and streamline that down and basically get our many documents out in different formats very quickly.
Kevin: So Andy, why did you folks select DocOrigin versus all the other options available?
Andy: The biggest thing, I think, the reason that we selected it was when we were going through the evaluation process, one of the biggest things we were looking for was proof of concept. Obviously, when you’re looking at new software, you don’t want to go and spend money and then find out that the product doesn’t work. And so when we talked with the folks at Eclipse, they had no concern with doing proof of concept and they actually wanted to do proof of concept with our data. So that was very good for us and gave our people and the decision-makers a warm feeling, if you will, that they were getting a product and they would know that it would work for the requirements that we had.
Kevin: Well, and we’ll be hearing a bit later here, in just a few minutes, from Steve, just briefly about that proof of concept process and Eclipse welcomes all of our listeners to send in data and experience that proof of concept yourself. Now, Andy, would you recommend DocOrigin to another company, another colleague?
Andy: I would say, you know, with…in talking with anybody, I would basically say, for us, it has worked. Before anybody, like I say, gets any software, I caution them to do proof of concept if they can and judge for themselves. We were satisfied, we were very happy with what we got through our relationship with Eclipse and the DocOrigin product.
Kevin: And how was it working with the team at Eclipse?
Andy: It is fantastic. I mean, we, as Mike and Kerry said earlier, when we have an issue, we can contact either their customer support area and get result or, on occasion, we will go to an individual, but always responses, always come up with some best practices, if you will, in developing documents and getting your output.
Kevin: You’ve done a lot with DocOrigin already. What’s the future hold? You have plans to expand the use of the software?
Andy: At this point, we’re just finishing all the transformation from our three different products onto DocOrigin. We got one document we’re going through final testing on, and then we do have plans to do an upgrade in the next quarter, I believe. So that’s gonna keep us busy for a little while.
Kevin: All right, well, Andy, it’s been great speaking with you today. We’re almost out of time for this segment. One last question, what is your advice for other organizations attempting something similar?
Andy: Again, like I say, it’s…choose your tools properly. Check out what’s available. See what works for you because not everything works for everybody. And be comfortable with what you’ve got. I know we’ve become very comfortable with DocOrigin and our team are very happy with it and so that’s the biggest thig I can say is everybody has to review it themselves.
Kevin: And it helps when you can do a proof of concept from the get go, to feel comfortable moving forward.
Andy: Definitely. Like I say, the decision-makers from our team, when we went through that proof of concept and we laid our requirements, and all the boxes got ticked, we were, you know, in a good position.
Kevin: All right. We love those boxes. All right. That’s Andy Nadeau, a senior programmer analyst at McKesson Medical-Surgical. Andy, thank you so much for being our guest today.
Andy: My pleasure.
Kevin: Well, we’d like to thank once again, Mike Badeaux and Kerry Diez from Mele Printing and for being with us earlier in this webcast. Before we head to questions and answers, I’d like to invite Eclipse CEO Steve Luke to speak with us for just a moment or two. Now, Steve, we’ve been talking about proof of concept and you say that our listeners don’t have to take our word for it, you invite them to send us your data and we’ll rock your world. What do you mean by that and how does it work?
Steve: Hi, thanks, Kevin, and thanks to everyone else who have spoken today for us and on our behalf, and thank you to everyone who’s listening today. What customers can look forward to in working with our company is that we’ll actually earn your business. We don’t run our business on a quarterly basis. We are here for the long haul. Our senior executive team have been in the industry for quite a while and we’ve got a young team now that we’ve been cross-training. So we’re gonna be here for quite a long time and we’re looking forward to more than some new business and earning that new business.
What people can get out of our technology is to know that the number one feature that we have is reliability and performance is number two, and features are number three, although I think you’ll find it difficult to find a feature or functionality that we don’t currently have. We provide a scalable price system that will allow any size company. We have a hospital that only has 23 beds and we have several Fortune 10 customers. So we really have worked in a lot of ways to earn our business and to provide the technology that makes these companies successful also. But you don’t need to take our word for it. you can simply send your data to us, and we will do a proof of concept for you.
One of the common questions asked, you know, by our prospects is how does Eclipse meet the need of so many industries? If you’ve been watching the documents that have been sliding by while everyone was talking, you’ll pretty much see that we have customers in virtually every industry. We have software in 60 countries in the world, so we are ready to prove that we can do this for you. It really boils down to the common things that all industries have and that is that all business software, no matter what brand of software it is, no matter what core software it is, all that software generates data, and that data needs to be seen by humans, and it needs to be consumed by machines. And the data’s gonna be in different format types. And because we have the capability with our FilterEditor and other technologies to consume this date even if it was generated in the ’80s or the ’70s, and of course, XML data today, we’re capable of dealing with that.
We actually created a technology back in the ’90s called Integration Without ModificationTM. And one of the reasons we did this is because we learned a long time ago that the tail can’t wag the dog. And what we mean by the tail can’t wag the dog is that we learned years ago, when we were competing against larger corporations, that if we told the Oracle customer or an SAP customer to go back and modify their program or change something in order for us to be able to generate the presentation they wanted, to produce the delivery that they wanted, that we oftentimes were just kicked right in the teeth and out the door.
So Integration Without ModificationTM, it’s been so popular and such a powerful part of our technology to allow us to work with the data that we get and produce the presentation and delivery we want, we’ve actually registered that as a trademark, and we are really looking forward to having people come to us and challenge us and send us your data and your specifications for your forms, documents and labels. There’s a single solution that pretty much handles all departments in your business and we’re confident we’ll rock your world.
Kevin: Now, Steve, if I’m interested in sending you data, how do I do it? Where do I go and who do I talk to?
Steve: I think we’re gonna put Jeff Gary’s name up later, but you can send information to Info@EclipseCorp.US or you can send it to Jeff.Gary@EclipseCorp.US. These numbers will be presented when…at the end of the slide presentation and they’ll be kept up on the screen for a few minutes.
Kevin: All right, very good. Well, thank you, Steve.
Steve: Thank you, Kevin.
Kevin: Now, I’d like to open it up for questions. I know we have some coming in from the audience and if you have questions, please go ahead and submit them now. But our first question, on average, how much time does it take to stand up a nude statement format using DocOrigin given that the data format is defined and a statement design is approved? Good question. Anyone like to take that? I know we have a number of Eclipse folks here on the call with us today. So I’ll just open it up to everyone on our panel. Anyone have a response for that.
Steve: You know, I think I might do that. Unless one of my team members wants me to stop right now and tells me to, I’ll do that. First of all, it’s impossible to say exactly how long it will take just simply because some statements are very simple ones, some very complex as we heard from Andy and heard from Mike. You can have a statement that could be done in a matter of a couple of hours, you have some that take weeks.
I think one of the interesting things when it comes to statements, if you’re doing a statement for a single company, I would say typically with our software, you’re talking about hours to a few days to get the product or the forms completely designed, the data set up. Typically, we can consume the data in the format that it’s being provided without any modifications to that because, again, Integration Without ModificationTM, we are not gonna ask you or your customer to make changes. You give us that raw data. We wanna be able to work with it.
You know, in general, we have a lot of what we call rapid migration solutions built in to our Integration Without ModificationTM. For example, if you give us a PDF of the output that you’re producing now, we can consume that PDF and start…and turn again to our template so we switch from a PDF that was given to us by you and we turn it into a negative template for DocOrigin. It’s extremely important that we have that we have that negative template because when you’re starting to produce hundreds of thousands of documents per hour, or even millions and millions of documents a day, I think, if I’m correct, and Andy can jump in here later and tell me if I’m wrong, but I think McKesson, for instance, is generating over 2 million documents a month. AT&T uses our technology and provides output to 6,000 retail stores in real time.
So you know, the complexity can make a big difference, but because of our rapid migration tools, our ability to convert a PDF, we can accept the file formats from Adobe Central, from Adobe LiveCycle, from Adobe AEM. We can accept a template file from StreamServe and convert it into our native template.
So I think what the short answer is because of our rapid migration tools, there’s a good chance that we can migrate your forms and templates faster than any competitor out there on the market or at least as fast.
Kevin: Okay, then. Sounds good. Clearly, as we’ve heard today, from both Mele and McKesson. Another question that has popped up, a simple one, what document format types are supported for output? Anybody?
Greg: This is Greg Garner speaking, forms developer with Eclipse Corporation.
Kevin: That’s great.
Greg: Typically, we’re talking about PostScript, PCL, PDF. We have an HTML output generation capability. So generally speaking, I’d suggest that any of the typical output paths are covered by our solution.
Kevin: Now, we have another question. I want to keep going because we have questions coming in.
Steve: Kevin, hang on one second, Kevin. Greg mentioned PDF. We also do PDF/UA, we’re 508-compliant, PDF-A3 which means we can you…send a document and embed other documents in it. So we send you a PDF and it can have Excel documents, Word documents, etc., embedded into the actual PDF. So it’s basically like sending a document as a transport for all the loan documents that are necessary to be inside one PDF. All the supporting documents for the loan, for instance. And then HTML adaptive for smart phones and tablets. So those are just, at the high level, those are the formats we’ve got. I’m gonna let you go back because it sounds like you already got another question.
Kevin: Yeah, good points, though, Steve. That’s just, again, another indicator of a next generation solution. I mean, listen to all of those options that we have. I mean, to me, that’s pretty impressive. All right, next question, what was the impact on other parts of the workflow when moving from prior composition tool to DocOrigin? Interesting question, perhaps one of our customers can answer that.
Mike: This is Mike from Mele. I don’t think there was really much of an impact at all. Once we started our conversion, we were able to continue using the, I’ll say the older solutions while we were converting over to the new…to DocOrigin. So not much of an impact at all because things kept running as it was supposed to. I guess the thing that we were trying to do is that the customer didn’t know we were changing. That was the goal.
Kevin: So it was fairly transparent to everyone, really.
Mike: Yes, it was, and that was our goal, to keep it transparent so that the customer didn’t experience any hiccups at all, that they just knew that maybe their statement now had more color than it did before or, you know, maybe a slightly different format than what it looked like before. Other than that, they didn’t realize anything else was going on.
Kevin: I guess our listener is really asking, yes, we would put it out here in the West, there were no hitches in the gitalong, if you will. There were no surprises that caused you to have gaps in performance of the process.
Mike: Not at all, not at all.
Steve: Kevin, can I interject one thing here real quick? We actually have, as part of the tools that we provide in the production side, a lot of our customers, like for instance, Legal & General Insurance, which is the 7th largest insurer in the world, has more than 3,000 form templates, and they’re using a legacy application and there’s no way in the world they’re gonna be able to move all 3,000 applications overnight. It’s a multi-year process. We have built in our solution, a capability of switching the forms one at a time over to the new software, so we literally have been able to let them complete the design, complete the QA and the test for that design, move that form into production.
But what’s really cool about it is let’s say that this, unfortunately, every once in a while, it happens, QA process is completely done, we’re three weeks into it, four weeks into it, using it in production and we realize or they realize that they have one little thing that’s not going right. They literally, within just a few minutes, can switch back to their legacy application. So it’s a matter of one, we can switch them over one form at a time or do a whole batch at a time. But the cool thing is if we are worried about any kind of possibility that we might have to revert back to that legacy, we are able to do it pretty fast.
Kevin: Well, I know, Steve, Integration Without ModificationTM, we talked in other times where you folks have really put a lot of effort into that whole migration process. It’s not just about the tools capabilities, it’s also about the effort and process to get to the end state and that’s been a big part of the development of the tools.
Steve: Correct.
Kevin: All right. Another question coming in, and if you have questions, now would be the time to get them in. Can this tool generate interactive HTML output? Anybody?
Greg: Yes.
Kevin: It can. Tell me more.
Greg: As a component of our design software, we are able to generate HTML5 that will allow for interactive capabilities. And as Steve said, the form that we generate is adaptive, so it doesn’t matter if you want to run it on a phone or on a tablet or on your desktop, you’ll be able to have full access to all the fields that are available. You have more to add, Steve?
Steve: No, I think that was a pretty good explanation, Greg. We have, as Greg said, adaptive form technology, which means that the form’s gonna automatically change its size based on what device it’s actually serving. And I think that’s really, really powerful.
You know, one of the things that we also do that we haven’t talked about all today is that when you design a template, a form, or a label, or a document with our product, you only have to design one template. If you want to produce it in HTML, or you want to produce it in PDF, or PCL or PostScript, we use the same template for all those outputs and that’s one of the big changes over all…a lot of the older legacy products. In a lot of the legacy products, if you want to produce a PDF, you have to design a template and basically, that template would be set up only to produce a PDF. If you needed to do a PCL or an HTML, you had an individual template for each one in order to adapt to the output type. So the beautiful thing for us is if we’re doing dynamic omnichannel delivery and we have to switch from a PDF presentation to an HTML presentation, and we have…or maybe we’re doing some print, some PDF to the archive and to the portal and some delivery directly to a device or an SMS message with a link, it can all be done with one template.
Kevin: All right.
Greg: It takes us to another interesting area, Steve, and that’s the ability to provide Americans with Disabilities Act Section 508 PDF/UA Compliant Forms. We’re capable of developing fully WCAG 2.0 level compliance. We are able to do a 508 compliance for PDF/UA. The purpose of that is so that these forms are navigable with the reader tools like JAWS or Window-Eyes.
About three years ago, we got into a sit-…not into a situation, we realized the situation where we thought that in the ability to provide PDF/UA documents to be very significant to our customers, and we started pursuing resources, consultants, outside companies like Brailleworks out of Florida to help us come up with software that will do… a component of the solution would be it would automatically tag, if you…the terminology from Adobe is tag a document automatically. But since no software can actually tag completely and compliantly, we also have the capability of overriding those tags so that we can get very specific about the kinds of information. We have to be able to have artifacts. We have to be able to have images. We have to identify tables and paragraphs, and so on and so forth. All that is so that the document is navigable by these reader tools.
Steve: Greg, that’s a great amount of information. One other thing that I wanna mention about our PDF/UA technology is one, out design tool auto tags, the document as you’re designing a PDF/UA. However, when you have a product that will create documents as dynamic as our solution does, you really can’t rely on just the auto-tagging. You need experts that are helping you design the form so that you make sure that some of these very dynamic marketing, branding, and advertising-type thing actually are still 508-compliant. We found in the early stages of developments that the auto tags just wasn’t enough if we were gonna dynamically put different ads on every page.
Another thing that’s important to understand about our technology is we are processing from raw data to the PDF/UA. A lot of the competitors in the industry and the early adaptors of getting PDF 508-compliant documents out there were taking in a PDF and consuming a PDF and producing a PDF/UA. One of the downsides to that is that you have to design a PDF first and you’re using it, and then you have to put it in through a PDF conversion, so you’re really using two separate design tools to actually get the finished product. And in addition to that, you’re processing a document that had to be processed once, so you create your first PDF and you consume that PDF, and then you make this PDF/UA. We ran some tests against some of the most popular post-processing tools, post-processing being they take in a PDF, they produce a PDF/UA. In most of the tests we ran, we were between 30% and 40% faster. So if we took in raw data and produced a PDF, we would actually get it done 30% to 40% faster than any of the post-processing tools that we found on the market. So that’s an ongoing cause.
Kevin: All right. Very good. Well, we are running very short of time. I wanna thank all of our participants today. I wanna thank Eclipse Corporation and Xplor for having me. I’m Kevin Craine. It’s been my pleasure to be the moderator today. I’m gonna turn it back over to Chad. Chad?
Chad: All right. Thank you so much, Kevin. Thank you everybody for being here. This was a very informative hour. But with that, we can go ahead and conclude today’s webinar. From the Xplor side, I do wanna thank Kevin today for moderating. This was kind of a different event than we usually run, and I really enjoyed it. I want to thank all the guests that we had here as well for sharing today and Eclipse Corporation for sponsoring the event overall.
I want to remind everyone to go to the Xplor website often. On it, you’re gonna find updates on our programs, upcoming events, and the many other resources we have available. Speaking of upcoming events, Xplor will be returning to Print 18 to have another lively breakfast panel discussion. So join moderator Pat McGrew from Keypoint Intelligence as she shares her perspective on the industry and engages our vendor panel to share their thoughts on where the industry is, what the future holds, and how their offerings are bringing success to their customers. IF you’re gonna be at Print 18, you won’t wanna miss this event. So head on over to xplor.org and find all the information through our event banner or under the events tab. So thank you all and we will now disconnect.
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