debitel AG
From the PC straight to print with AFP datastreams
Experts who prophesized the end of the letter in the era of the Internet and e-mail, are amazed with the increasing volume of post in the enterprise. As an example, the telecommunications provider debitel AG sends 15,000 letters a day. Moreover, staff at the company reckon they send over three million invoices a month to customers, also by post.
That this volume of post can’t be dealt within a rational way when individuals are involved in each and every step to prepare letters, from writing through to posting, seems obvious at the first glance. However, few companies have addressed this issue: debitel has taken this route, and with help from DocBridge Pilot has optimized some elements of letter production and the associated printing and posting process. By doing this the company has not just reduced the cost of this aspect of written correspondence, but has also substantially improved overall operation.
In spite of the telephone, the Internet, and e-mail, letter based communication in business is still highly regarded. In particular in written communication with clients and partners, letters are often used as a more professional formal form of address.
Admittedly, letters are a relatively expensive and laborious communication medium. In the end this has much to do with the fact that company managers understand poorly how this apparently archaic process works in the various departments.
As the person at debitel responsible for quality control of printing and standards, this phenomena of a special type of uncontrolled growth came to the attention of Alfred Prasch. “My responsibilities include ensuring that all customer-oriented correspondence leaving our doors has the same appearance. This does not just mean a standardized layout, but also conformance to corporate wordings, corporate identity, and the correct form of address, as well as paying attention to legal requirements, as far as this is possible in the rush of daily business.”
With diverse requirements coming from the various departments, it is important to keep in mind the efficiency of the process. It is not always possible to meet requirements without any changes in a “generally applicable” set of guidelines. A quick look at the day-to-day procedures soon revealed the need for an automation process adapted to individual departments.
As a example, while some letters had been signed by individual staff themselves, other had to have an additional signature. Letter printing and dispatch was the next challenge. The cost of postage, printed materials, paper, and envelopes is not insignificant, and together with the cost of a unique, largely manual process with much personal initiative is difficult to estimate.
“To reduce costs in this area, we had to offer central document processing based on an IT supported process.” Central – for Prasch this means making it easer for staff to answer customer queries – without the somewhat unpopular jobs of printing, signing, inserting into envelopes, and taking to the post. “The competence of our people in the departments is not in printing and sending post. Their job is to concentrate on the content and to develop a suitable response – in this case to compose a good letter. Printing and dispatch can be done from a central location.”
By centralizing these functions we reduce the work being done in parallel: e.g. the business of individual printing, filling envelopes, postage, and delivering to the post office. But, how can a company funnel printed output from distributed desktops to the print center?
Prasch was of the opinion that a thorough analysis of the problem area and the various solutions was overdue, an activity he began with printing specialists from Compart. For him it became clear that the process optimization could only be realized based on a central print datastream and that Compart could both apply its know-how and its output management software to the problem.
With a central solution the print center is the key element for handling the print process for all correspondence, not just automatic printing but the complete process up to dispatch including inserting in envelopes, franking, and packing. “After dispatch we receive an automatic confirmation that the consignment actually went out – a signal that for all concerned the job has been done”, Prasch summarizes the result of the optimized process.
debitel and Compart implemented the test installation in the “individual correspondence” department. For the past six months 20 of 80 employees have been printing on the large T-Systems digital press in Weingarten.
“Individual correspondence cannot be managed in volume” says Prasch. “In most cases our colleagues sit at their workstations and use Word to manually answer the post.” Of course they have access to standard text blocks and macros, “but the employee is responsible for the “glue” to bring the various elements together.” In the end each letter must be formulated individually and cannot be standardized. “We don’t want to batter our customers with fragments of standard text but address them with respectfully formulated correspondence!”
The employee inserts a digital signature at the end of the finished letter, so this step can also be automated. This is done with a custom function in Word: Finally an electronic copy of the letter is saved in a directory on the server - at which stage the employees work is complete.
“Colleagues in the same department have access to the directory via a web client and can check if the letter conforms to guidelines. If this is the case, the document is approved for printing. Incorrectly formulated letters on the other hand can be excluded from dispatching and held back for rewriting.”
“Now we have a personal letter in the common document pool, ready for dispatch to the print service,” adds Prasch. These documents are properly prepared for the print service with components of the Compart DocBridge Pilot product: Converted to AFP, they contain all the information required to control the automatic process in the print center.
The print center processes the letter according to debitel standards. It bundles all the currently available print jobs, so they may efficiently be processed together on the printing system. AFP documents in the print spool are collected together and processed according to factors such as price, priority, and postage optimization. “With this concept we make tremendous savings, because we can optimize many elements of the process,” says Prasch happily. “The most benefit comes when we handle all the company’s correspondence.”
The debitel Implementation
A customer support center in Ettlingen is concerned exclusively with answering individual customer enquiries. Approximately three hundred individual responses per day are prepared with Word and dispatched. Once the letters were ready they were often checked by a second employee as part of a peer review process and corrected as necessary. Previously, letters were printed on a departmental printer and signed by hand. Finally they were manually put into envelopes and given to the internal post.
With DocBridge Pilot came the introduction of a host of changes in the complete letter production and printing process:
- XML-Packing Slip:
The difference between the process before and after the introduction of DocBridge Pilot begins with the execution of a macro, creating the customer address in the Word letter by getting data from a special customer support application and setting it into the address field of the letter. The macro was modified for the changeover: In addition a separate XML-packing slip is added to the AFP file. This slip includes data generated by the macro and partly enhanced by information collected from an on-line dialog, and includes information such as the address, participant number, customer number (for storage reasons) and the status (review or send). The packing slip produced with this data is stored in a special server directory by the macro. - Digital Signature:
Following consultations with in-house lawyers, a decision was taken to deposit a signature in black script as an image in a personal employee directory. A Word macro was developed to import this signature image and insert it at the appropriate place in the document. - Conversion to AFP:
After the letter has been prepared in Word and saved as a Word document, it is converted to a format suitable for the print service: DocBridge Pilot is used to convert the Word document to an AFP document. The DocBridge Application Renderer is used as an input filter, through its own printer driver to convert PC documents to raster image documents such as TIFF etc. or to PDFs.
In principle it is now possible to convert the Word document to a text-based AFP file using Compart’s DOPE/compose product, resulting in a significantly “slimmer”, i.e. smaller document. After analysis of which elements, specifically which fonts, the users have selected, these variations are dropped. Since the user is given a free choice regarding the actual content of the letter and the ability to use all the features of Word, they do get used. A standardization use of fonts etc. could not be enforced – a requirement for the use of DOPE/compose. It is for this reason the decision was made to use the raster image AFP version.
- Electronic Forwarding and Release
Once a letter had been prepared in Word, it was no longer printed in the department nor checked by another employee, but made available in a directory for optional quality control. DocBridge Pilot provides the user with a web-based interface for reviewing letters, which can be used for listing and selecting documents. For this Compart’s multi format viewer - DocBridge View - is used, with its special capability of presenting AFP documents.
This way, employees can use the peer review process to check finished letters and either give them for release or if required delete them if they need to be changed or re-written.
- AFP Datastream Preparation
Each day about 300 individual AFP documents collect in the server directory. At the end of the day Compart’s DocBridge Pilot product is used to combine all AFP documents into one file for the continuous-feed paper process at the print service. Taking into account the duplex printing needs, this means inserting an empty page at the end of a document with an uneven number of pages and doing the page setup for 2-up printing (2 A4 pages turned 90 degrees and printed as 2 A4 pages side by side on A3 wide printing paper) in an AFP datastream.
The letter attributes for DP postage and postage optimization are added to the AFP datastream by DocBridge Pilot via the XML letter packing slip: The TLEs (non-printing control sequences) information is inserted into each letter in the AFP datastream.
The result is a complete AFP spool - “made to measure” for the print service center, as if it came from a process specifically made for the purpose”, summarizes Jörg Palmer, head of Professional Services at Compart and responsible for this project.