Böblingen, 07/29/2011
ROLAND steers its output management with DocBridge Pilot
The ROLAND Group, international insurer specialized in legal protection, has updated its output management (OM) system. At the core of this transformation is DocBridge Pilot software, which the company uses to control the printing of approx. two million documents annually: policies, correspondence, premium statements, account cards, reports, attachments. The solution, developed by Compart, was introduced in only three months. It operates approx. 90 different print stacks, based on the category and recipient of the communication.
One Pilot for every need
The insurance company, among Germany's leading companies in legal protection, was looking for an innovative tool that would automatically recognize what document to process, how to process it and the channel to use for the output. They also needed software that would support all the popular data formats, like PCL, PDF as well as AFP, on both the input and output sides. Ilja Wiemers, who is responsible for the document management systems at ROLAND Rechtsschutz-Versicherungs-AG, reports, “DocBridge Pilot lets you precisely define which documents that need to be output for which customers; that's the major advantage. And it does not require complex programming knowledge. What really won us over was the ability to define as many print stacks as we wanted and to tie in external print service providers.”
DocBridge Pilot software is platform-independent and supports customized mailings into every type of output: print, e-mail, fax, archive file, download file in Web portals. The import of the documents to be processed is kept separate from the output of the mailings. The software copies the data from a document and converts it, all while retaining the formatting. At this stage, the document can be modified, distributed, classified, indexed, and converted into all the standard formats, whatever is required. This enables documents to be displayed, printed, archived and processed as needed. The information needed for this process is extracted as metadata. While the software assigns the documents to a central mailing pool, the metadata is stored in a relational database. A printer driver implemented on the PC clients allows users to also save Office documents in the same mailing pool and continue processing them centrally.
Documents are retrieved automatically
Then there are the different functions for outputting the documents, such as sorting, converting to the desired format, or "enhancing" pages with additional information for continued processing. Examples include the addition of advertising flyers and instructions for downstream enveloping. It is also possible to bundle multiple documents from different sources and in different formats but destined for the same recipient. Depending on the software configuration, this task can be done completely automatically or initiated at some definable point in time. The advantage is that the software takes into account the permissible weight limit for a particular postal rate when it generates the mailings. Overall postal charges can be optimized in this way.
ROLAND uses DocBridge Pilot solely for printing. Once a day, all the documents created via an integrated scheduling function are retrieved from a central data pool and loaded into DocBridge Pilot. There the documents, either in PCL or AFP format, are processed and converted into AFP or PDF spool files to pass on to a service provider or print in house.
