By ALEX RIESS
While printed documents like invoices, notices or statements are just one piece of the puzzle of doing business at a manufacturing or service organization, for Print Service Providers (PSPs), documents are their product. Any interruption of the document generation process can lead to significant losses of revenue.
Once one of the PSP’s clients has outsourced the production of their documents to them, they expect and demand fast and reliable delivery. The PSP simply cannot afford any downtime. One of the main reasons to use a PSP is their ability to produce large batches of documents reliably in a short period of time and the PSP’s expertise in optimizing the cost of generating the documents and reducing cost.
The single most important and largest cost savings can be realized with postal cleansing and postage cost. Every serious PSP will use some mailing software solution. The good ones, most likely, will use BCC Mail Manager, the most highly rated solution in the market.
Every PSP is different, but they have one thing in common- They require that the document generation software:
- Is extremely reliable
- Is easy to use
- Has top performance
- Is extremely flexible
- Offers data driven customer communications promo features
- Offers multiple output formats
- Offers conversion tools for different input formats
Eclipse’s DocOrigin meets all these requirements:
- No reported production downtime for any client in the last 36 months.
- After a short training, form templates can be designed in a few hours using the powerful Design application.
- Between 3,000 and 15,000 pages per minute, depending on the complexity and structure of the form templates on a medium sized server.
- Every step of the document generation process can be customized using JavaScript with DocOrigin’s extensions.
- Whether PCL, PostScript, PDF, HTML or specialized label formats (Zebra, TEC) required, DocOrigin does them all. You can even produce multiple output formats in a single run.
- DocOrigin provides data conversion functions for Character Separated Files and Adobe’s Field Nominated Files, right out of the box. For flat files or spool files from mainframe systems, a GUI based extraction tool is available. Any other file conversions (i.e. fixed record files) can easily be achieved using JavaScript. DocOrigin offers parsing extensions to handle even very complex conversion requirements easily.
In a typical workflow at one of our PSP users, they receive the raw data file, either via FTP upload, as attachment to an email or from their web site which allows their customers to drop the files. FolderMonitor, which is one of DocOrigin’s automation features, is set up to watch the location of these dropped files.
As the first step in the process, the raw input file is converted to a structured XML format and each transaction within the batch is assigned a unique identifier. Once this is done, the address information of each transaction is extracted, together with the unique identifier. This subset of the XML file is then sent to BCC Mail Manager, where
- The address information is updated to follow the USPS standards
- The data for the intelligent mail barcode is provided
- A sequential number is assigned to each transaction for postage optimization
Now the updated XML file is sent back to the original process which applies the Mail Manager generated updates to the structured XML file. As a final step in the pre-process, DocOrigin’s DocumentSort feature is invoked to sort the updated XML file by the sequential number that was assigned by Mail Manager.
The XML file is now ready to be merged with the form template. During the merge process, a 2-D barcode is generated for each document which will be used by the folding/inserting equipment. If some of the documents were marked for electronic delivery, DocOrigin Merge can produce both types of output in a single run. Complete Omni Channel delivery is supported, including adaptive HTML for the support of smartphones and tablets. Many customers want important documents to be mailed to them, however for convenience they also may want to access them from a portal. With DocOrigin and BCC Mail Manager, PSPs give their clients the best Omni Channel delivery possible.
Finally, the run statistics of the DocOrigin merge process are being logged and/or directly sent to a database for accounting purposes. From start to finish, raw data is processed, postal information is extracted and cleansed, updated data is merged into data driven customer communications and delivered in the most cost effective method possible.
For more information on automating Omni Channel delivery including print and mail, contact your BCC Software or Eclipse Corporation representative.
Alex Riess is Chief Technology Officer at Eclipse Corporation. Alex celebrates his 24th year creating advanced enterprise form, document, and label solutions this year. He is always looking for a challenge and welcomes your questions or suggestions related to any document centric issue.