Companies that are faced with many types of correspondence and delivery channels often struggle with the complex data management that entails.  Each type of document involves a series of decisions, i.e., deciding on the information to include, the delivery channel to use (digital or physical) and the format for display. Hence many firms outsource their document logistics so they are free to concentrate on their core business.

QITS GmbH is one of the distinguished service providers of document processing (see box 1) that has specialized in the preparation and multi-channel delivery of documents. Their goal is to provide customers with customized services and software solutions for output management as a whole, from recording, indexing, and categorizing incoming correspondence - regardless of channel or format - to modification, conversion, and ultimately multi-channel-capable output.

Full-color printing spurs growth

The output management division produces nearly 40 million mailings of 100 million printed pages annually: highly personalized letters, account statements, invoices, dunning letters, salary slips, and various types of daily correspondence. By introducing digital full-color printing, QITS was able to lure additional customers who themselves did not want to make the costly investment but still wanted to benefit from the technology. QITS invested in inkjet technology, which makes bulk printing in color even more attractive to many clients, yet another reason why QITS has enjoyed such rapid growth particularly over the last four years.

The ability of the service provider to prepare every document specific to the recipient and channel is its hallmark and is a cornerstone of its business strategy. The customer delivers the raw data and QITS does the rest: formatting, conversion, modification, bundling, and output.

E-Postbrief and other digital channels on the horizon

At nearly 90 percent, physical documents still make up the bulk of the business. But for many customers QITS is also handling traditional e-mail with PDF attachments as well as other digital delivery channels. The company plans to expand electronic delivery over the next several years, and promote E-Postbrief and other digital alternatives to traditional mail. Similar efforts will be devoted to other forms of legally binding electronic mail such as De-Mail, IncaMail, Regify, and e-invoicing procedures. The fact is that the volume of paper documents worldwide is decreasing. Increasing digitalization means new market opportunities for QITS.

Wanted: a central OMS for all channels and formats

The company’s earlier home-grown solution did not accommodate the new strategic direction. It especially lacked the urgently needed range of conversion filters (AFP, PDF, PCL, PostScript, SAP, etc.). Hence the service provider sought to move document processing onto a completely new technological foundation. The core of the central output management solution is DocBridge Pilot. The software developed by Compart serves as the main hub that takes the documents the customers provide, modifies and converts them, adds any needed information, and directs them to the appropriate output channels. So even before the documents are printed, data analyses bundle them into postage-optimized mailings, which can be electronically franked if needed.  For conversion, the system generates the appropriate optical mark recognition (OMR) or data matrix codes and embeds them in the correspondence. Electronic formats are prepared for the specific recipients and transmitted.

Found: a pilot for all routes

QITS chose DocBridge Pilot because the software works with every electronic and physical delivery channel and all the standard data formats. Technical director Oliver Winkelmann points out another criterion: “DocBridge Pilot is quite scalable and can be integrated into any conceivable IT infrastructure. What really convinced us is how we can modify the performance of the solution depending on how low or high our mail volume is.” QITS needed an application that could process many different jobs in parallel and still best utilize available IT resources.  DocBridge Pilot offered the company the ability to adjust the computer capacities for document processing by virtualizing the servers within the company network. Hence there was no need for costly hardware investment (servers, processors, main memory).
The growing list of requirements that Winkelmann and his colleagues had for the new output management solution was implemented swiftly and consistently. The project was initially sparked by a renowned banking institution that had to create and output account statements in AFP format in an extremely short time. New document types and formats were gradually added, and the Compart solution was expanded accordingly with other input and output filters. Today the software manages approximately three-fourths of all output. Oliver Winkelmann: “From the very first minute, DocBridge Pilot ran reliably and error-free.” Switching to the new version 3.0 will give digitalization yet another boost.