Background
Formost mediaOne provides print and distribution services of bills, statements and other vital customer communications for a range of companies in the financial services, telecom, utilities, and health care markets. They are known for providing consistently high quality, competitive pricing, on-time delivery and exceptional customer service.
The company constantly seeks out innovative hardware and software solutions. They have been transitioning from offset continuous form, cut sheet and roll fed equipment to digital roll fed and cut sheet, and take advantage of economies of scale as well as best of breed hardware and software that allow them to meet their operational and customer requirements and constantly provide value to their customer base.
The Challenge
Formost mediaOne was already working with a bank to print and distribute statements on a quarterly basis. When the bank moved its legacy database to another system, the resulting output consisted of one PDF per account, or approximately 180,000 individual PDF documents, most with multiple page counts. This was clearly not going to make sense in a production environment, so Formost mediaOne approached Crawford Technologies to initiate three-way discussions with the bank, Formost mediaOne and CrawfordTech.
The fundamental challenge was how to combine these individual files to create statements within a print run that would optimize throughput, drive their inserters, support householding, and take advantage of opportunities for postal savings. In addition, the output needed to be intelligently grouped, based on whether the statement was for a dealer or a client, with the grouping further refined by page count, location and language. Because they had experienced font related issues with the previous PDF output, creating additional inefficiencies and bottlenecks, Formost mediaOne and their client required a solution that would automatically identify missing fonts and replace them with properly defined fonts.
The Solution
After analyzing the current workflow, the existing PDF files, and reviewing requirements and goals, CrawfordTech recommended implementing Operations Express in conjunction with PRO Concatenator. The bank agreed that it would be best to have Formost mediaOne take complete responsibility for the software and for all production and distribution.
PRO Concatentator is used to automatically and intelligently merge the individual PDFs into batches of approximately 50,000 files — a much more efficient run for production.
Operations Express is employed to embed or substitute fonts, apply OMR bar codes for Formost mediaOne’s inserters and automatically group the output files based on document recipient, number of pages, and location. It is also used to split and index files to prepare for archiving and ePresentment.
Results
The implementation was completed, including testing, in less than a week. With a batch processing routine implemented by CrawfordTech professional services, file processing and output is now highly automated and error-free. They have extended this workflow to other clients, taking advantage of the same core capabilities to increase throughput and gain efficiencies.
Alex Calpito, Director of Operations comments “We are confident in the capabilities of the software. It does exactly what we need, and we continue to do more with it. What’s most impressive is the way CrawfordTech responded to our needs. They were phenomenal! The individuals and teams we work with are always there for us and bend over backward to accommodate us.”
Formost mediaOne is already planning on adding additional Crawford Technologies’ solutions and are currently planning to implement a document accessibility solution to automate the creation of Accessible PDF files for a new customer.
“We’re looking forward to continuing to work with Crawford Technologies, and view our relationship as a collaborative and successful partnership.” said Alex Calpito.
