Every company that runs personalized advertising campaigns is familiar with the phenomenon: the number of variants in direct mail is increasing rapidly. Several thousand different versions within a campaign are not uncommon. It would be a futile endeavor to manually compare each document with the template. The risk of error is too high, especially as the complexity of mailing campaigns increases.
One hundred percent reliable document checking is essential. Tools for automated document testing provide the technological basis for this.
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Arvato Bertelsmann is a media, services and education company that operates in about 50 countries around the world. In the past, document checking at arvato was mainly done manually. But with the increasing volume of invoices, the company quickly reached its limits: The purely visual comparison was not only time-consuming, but also did not offer the one hundred percent certainty on which the service provider depends.
When checking by means of various test scenarios, a residual risk always remained. Therefore, arvato urgently needed a tool that would automate the document comparison and take into account all changes - even those that are not visible to the naked eye.
Since 2012, arvato has been working with the DocBridge® Delta document checking software - and is thus able to compare documents both visually and at the text level. The solution detects even the smallest differences, even in complex and extensive documents. Thanks to the high degree of automation, document analysis at arvato is now not only more secure, but also more efficient: Employees can concentrate better on their core business.
Compliance and 100% Quality Assurance
Learn How to Reap the Benefits of an Automated Document Quality Assurance
In the past, document testing at arvato was mainly done manually. But with the increasing volume of invoices, the company quickly reached its limits: The purely visual comparison was not only time-consuming, but also did not offer the one hundred percent security on which the service provider depends. When checking using various test scenarios, there was always a residual risk.
Advantages of testing methods with DocBridge® Delta software:
Roger Fuchs
arvato Bertelsmann
Digital document comparison
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DocBridge® Delta offers three basic technologies for verification:
The solution developed by Compart finds and analyzes differences between individual documents electronically and also visualizes them. In the process, the objects coded in the files are examined down to every detailed structure and the differences are displayed - both visually and textually. Certain areas can be excluded from the comparison, for example the variable address field.
During visual comparison, both documents are rasterized into a pixel image of the same resolution and the converted pixel images are compared with each other - similar to a light table where both documents are superimposed to detect differences between them. In the generated file, the pixels that match in both documents are displayed in gray. If, on the other hand, individual pixels occur in only one of the two documents, the pixels present only in the reference document are displayed in green and the corresponding pixels in the document to be matched are displayed in red.
In this way, even the smallest differences in objects, such as margins that differ by only one pixel width in the case of slightly differently cut characters of a font, are immediately recognizable. If the document to be compared shows that the entire content has been shifted, an additional setting can be used to compensate for the shift in order to check whether there are any other differences between the documents apart from the shift.
If there are individual pages in the documents to be compared that are not present in the comparison document, these can be suppressed during the comparison, for example to exclude additionally created blank pages from the comparison. The difference document with the comparison points highlighted in color is output as a multipage TIFF document or as a usual PDF.
DocBridge® Delta documents the detected differences of the individual objects on each page in detail to a log file. From the entries in the log file, differences of the following type, for example, can be found:
Before checking, the documents to be compared are converted to the Unicode-based metaformat, so that even if a different code page is used, only real text differences are registered.
The solution developed by Compart finds and analyzes differences between individual documents electronically and also visualizes them. In the process, the objects coded in the files are examined down to every detailed structure and the differences are displayed - both visually and textually. Certain areas can be excluded from the comparison, for example the variable address field.
What to do when you need to reliably test hundreds of different documents against a specific template, but the files to be checked are not identical in length and structure? Conventional tools allow automated document comparison only if the reference document and the candidate document have exactly the same number of pages.
Better, because more flexible, are 1:n comparisons. The principle: An output file of any length and with different page types is compared page by page with a given template. The advantage of this "one-to-many" method is that the template (reference document) and the test file (candidate document) do not have to be identical in terms of page length and type. Thus, a document to be checked with hundreds of individual pages can be checked against a template of only a few pages with absolute certainty and accuracy.
Important: It is not enough to compare documents only on a visual level. After all, analysis at the pixel level is of little use if only five of 1,000 deviations found are actually relevant. Rather, it is also a matter of object and text comparison, i.e., the comparison must be made at bit level, because quite a few deviations cannot be detected with the naked eye.
Therefore: What is needed are solutions that allow the greatest possible tolerance during the check without neglecting absolute correctness in content, corporate identity (fonts, layout, etc.) and compliance (legal requirements) (fuzzy methodology).
Documents must comply with various rules, both legal and industry- and company-specific. Support is provided by high-performance software [solutions] that can be used to automatically and reliably check documents of any type and format against stored sets of rules. These can be formal criteria such as compliance with corporate design (wording, layout, etc.) or the correctness of addresses as well as compliance with legal regulations (archiving/verifiability, reporting, data protection, etc.).
1. Testing against factors relevant to production
2. Testing against postal rule
3. Testing against corporate design (CD) rules
4. Testing against legal requirements
Practice shows: Anyone who sends out six- or seven-figure shipments every year is constantly busy checking recipient addresses. This is time-consuming and expensive. Despite the various address qualification services offered by postal service providers (e.g. Premiumadress from DPAG), there is still a high risk of returns.
Qualified address management is not something you do on the side. Without professional support from IT solutions for automated and reliable address validation, nothing works here. The challenge: to extract the address from any data stream, check it for completeness and correctness and, if necessary, sort out the relevant item - BEFORE the mail is handed over to the service provider.
Detailed information about the structure of a print file is the be-all and end-all for high quality in production printing. This involves questions such as:
The aim of a document analysis is to avoid misprints and production disruptions
With professional document analysis software, misprinting doesn't stand a chance
Companies that print complex documents in large quantities and in many different formats (AFP, PDF, PCL, Metacode, PostScript, etc.) often do not have sufficient resources to analyze the files comprehensively. This makes it all the more important to have software tools that automatically determine all the data that is important for high-speed printing. These include:
One of the most important features: determining the color distribution within a print file. These software tools calculate exactly the proportion of CMYK colors required for full-color printing - both for the individual page and for the document as a whole.
The advantage? These results can be used to estimate printing costs even more accurately. What's more, software tools offer the option of storing freely definable maximum values for the CMYK analysis. On this basis, it is then easier to assess whether a print job is at all cost-effective. In short, this provides you with a reliable calculation tool and simplifies your document checking.
Even the smallest changes in the creation and formatting of documents affect their layout and content. Whether it's a new font, additional pages or a new release of the document-generating software - who always knows exactly how the modifications will affect the quality of the documents? Most importantly, is every change really relevant to production? A new logo or a new font size does not necessarily have consequences for content. But that is precisely what is at stake. The problem is that conventional inspection programs only offer a visual comparison. But analysis at pixel level is of little use if only five of 1,000 deviations found are actually relevant.
Regression testing: Qualified testing and not at any price
Fact: Automated and reliable quality checking is essential in high-volume document processing - after all, software updates and enhancements are commonplace in companies. Hardly any company has the resources to manually check the new documents (candidate document) against the templates (reference document) reliably for every modification. Especially not with tens of thousands of different document types! Better, because safer and faster, are automated regression tests. They check all changes and upgrades against the existing applications (legacy) without the employee having to intervene.
With its solutions, Compart automates the document testing of companies, authorities and organizations, thereby helping them to achieve higher productivity in their core business and ensuring one hundred percent compliance of the products.
