Mission accomplished

The company’s proprietary Post Substitutions-Mail or psm, which replaces traditional mail, enables major customers from a wide range of industries to send large numbers of sensitive documents in legally binding and compliant form. By eliminating postage and logistics, they are able to save up to 80 % of traditional mailing costs.

Every month 200,000,000 regular e-mails and 300,000 psm mails, with and without PDF attachments, are sent out: invoices, dunning letters, credits, offers and contracts. The company, founded in 1999, specializes in digital distribution and is one of Germany’s pioneers in e-mail marketing. Its customer base includes both large corporations and mid-sized companies that rely on the technology and agency services for all-round campaign management and direct marketing.

In light of their focus, it is no wonder that mission‹one› has proven expertise in legally binding electronic mail. But how do you combine the advantages of digital transmission with the binding nature and confidentiality of traditional mail without intricate authentication and separate e-mail addresses? And how do you make sure the documents reach the recipient if they cannot be delivered electronically?

It was these very questions that impelled the company to develop mission‹one› psm (Post Substitutions-Mail) and its high-end transmission base, mission‹one› control, to create a system for low-cost transmission of sensitive transaction documents - confidential and in large numbers.

Open to all Formats

But the software had to be able to process every data format. In other words, mission‹one› needed a tool that could efficiently prepare the outgoing documents for e-mail, regardless of where and in what application they were generated, be the source ERP (enterprise resource planning), CRM (customer relationship management), or an Office application. mission‹one›’s objective was to be open to all types of documents.

So mission‹one› decided to integrate DocBridge Mill into psm. The platformindependent, scalable solution from Compart analyzes, separates, classifies and indexes the data streams, and if necessary, converts them.

The strength of Compart’s software lies in its ability to process standard formats such as AFP, PDF, PCL, Post-Script, SAP GOF, LCDS, Metacode and XSL-FO on the input and output side alike. Documents of different origins can therefore be displayed, edited, output and archived using all the usual physical and digital channels. Not to mention powerful functions for converting documents while simultaneously modifying them.

If Not Electronically, then by Regular Mail

At mission‹one› DocBridge Mill is used for conversion. The company chose it because the software was highly compatible to its existing structures. Ralf Trimmel, Director of Product and Process Management: "DocBridge Mill is an ideal fit for our system. The integration was seam-less, from initial evaluation to full production took only three weeks."

The basic principle of the new system: the customer sends the document data in encrypted form (via SFTP, for example) to the mission‹one› server in a format such as AFP. There, DocBridge Mill converts the AFP files (or any other input format) into PDF attachments and extracts the metadata needed for e-mail dispatch as XML.

At this point, mission‹one› control takes the converted data, loads it into the database, and generates the HTML e-mails with the appropriate PDF attachments. From there the e-mails go out. The system automatically reports the response data to the customer, down to the exact number of clicks (when were the e-mail and attachment opened; who responded when, where and how). The system not only reports whether the docu-ment was received, but if it was actually read, or why the mail was returned (recipient’s mailbox full, server problems, invalid address). Mail that remains unopened during the specified period or is returned as "undeliverable" is then sent as a letter by traditional mail.

Why not Policies as E-mail?

Because of its wide distribution, mission‹one› settled on the PDF/A archive format. Hardly a system exists that cannot open and read these files. Ralf Trimmel also points out its excellent print quality. "The new regulations on e-invoicing give us a wide open market." The company intends to continually expand its portfolio to induce even more companies to send their documents, of whatever kind, through mission‹one›. Customers need transmit only the data; the service provider takes over from there - encryption, consulting, and services such as white space marketing or transpromo (the addition of advertising). Trimmel explains, "We intentionally tie into the customer’s existing processes so he immediately benefits from mission‹one› psm, i.e., secure data exchange and the ability to process all the popular formats."

The financial benefits are readily apparent. Since the go-live of mission‹one› psm with DocBridge Mill at the end of 2011, their customers have realized 80% savings in mailing costs. Once the one-off implementation costs are amortized this year, savings are expected to climb to over 90%.

Trimmel and his colleagues can easily envision sending insurance policies, utility bills and similar sensitive documents via this route in future. "Once the legal conditions on traceability are encoded in law, there’s no reason not to go digital," continues the IT manager. There’s no way better than with mission‹one› control and DocBridge Mill.