Content Critical Implements an Automated Workflow

The Challenge

Content Critical had deployed numerous customer solutions building the document workflow through data elements, application of business rules, and the use of composition engines to render client communications. As part of the Content Critical workflow solution, customer portals are provided that allow the customer to review, approve, reject, suppress, and report on the documents processed.

A new business opportunity required the use of composed print streams in AFP, PCL and PostScript®. These data formats needed to feed the Content Critical portal and provide the customer the same functionality that processing of data and generating the document offered.

“We knew that it wasn’t practical to ask our customers to make any changes in what they gave us,” comments Chief Technology Officer John Slaney. “All of the business rules, document layouts, and workflows would have had to be recreated, and the efforts to do that would have been risky and time-consuming, and ultimately not worth it since it would have been expensive and might have affected customer relationships. In order to see the savings that we wanted to achieve, it was essential that we be able to work with our existing print streams.”

Solution

After a thorough evaluation, Content Critical decided to work with Canon Solution America’s long-time solution providers, Crawford Technologies and BCC Software. They selected multiple CrawfordTech solutions, including PRO PS, PRO Indexer, and PRO Concatenator, combining them with Canon’s Océ PRISMAproduction workflow solution, and postal optimization solution BCC Mail Manager™ for an integrated production workflow.

“Gaps and unnecessary manual processes in our workflow were costing our business time and money. Identifying these was the key to further growth and customer satisfaction.” Says John Slaney. “Combining BCC Mail Manager’s automation capabilities into the workflow with Canon and Crawford, we were able to deliver a comprehensive and complete workflow. The improvements reduced our turnaround time for data processing, helping to ensure on time customer SLA’s, improved scheduling for high demand print jobs, and dramatically reduced resources necessary to our overall data processes.”

Additionally, the CrawfordTech solutions provided the required meta data from the document, enabling Content Criticals’s document portal solutions. Document stakeholders are able to access individual documents for Quality Control review, production approvals, and report on metrics captured within the print streams.

To manage the multiple steps in processing the print streams, Content Critical looked to Canon’s PRISMAproduction Workflow Module to provide automation and eliminate manual intervention where not required.

The Results

With this tightly integrated workflow, Content Critical takes advantage of the speed and features of their new optimized workflow and has realized significant postal savings that benefits their customers as well as their own bottom line.

John Slaney adds, “thanks to the well-coordinated CrawfordTech, BCC Software, and Canon professional services and training, we were up and running in two weeks. Their collaboration was an ideal solution and a huge benefit for us since it resulted in virtually no interruption to ongoing production or to customer delivery schedules.”