In 2001, the company boards of two large European banks agreed to a merger
transaction, creating a new holding group organization. The resulting company
is now one of the largest financial services providers in the United Kingdom,
with business interests in retail banking, commercial banking, personal finance,
insurance, investment holdings, stock brokerage, and trust management. With
more than 20 million customers and a wide variety of financial products and
services, the merger created collective expertise and scale to challenge the
world's largest financial services companies.
During the course of its merger transaction, the company was confronted with
relocating and implementing £8 million worth of disparate IT equipment.
To make matters worse, the IT group also needed to support the increased workload
and demands of a much larger organization with a greater number of business
users. To satisfy these requirements, they sought a new output management solution
that could leverage its existing dissimilar IT environment while at the same
time supporting and improving the existing output process.
"Using the Solimar Print/Director significantly reduces development time. It is very cost effective and operator friendly."
IT Executive
European Banking Holding Group
The company selected the Solimar® Print/Director system to help solve
its output integration and management challenges. The Solimar Print/Director
connects and manages all production printing by receiving Metacode data from
the mainframe via TCP/IP and driving two channel connected, high volume Xerox
4090 printers. The legacy Xerox LCDS/Metacode data streams are converted to
PostScript by Print/Director's XCHANGE::PostScript transform module, then automatically
routed to the appropriate non-production Xerox DP65 and distributed HP desktop
printers. In addition, the company eliminated the print and distribution costs
for some of its LCDS legacy data streams, which are now converted to viewable
PDF files and automatically split, separated, and electronically distributed
to the appropriate department using highly sophisticated criteria-based rules.
As a result of installing and implementing the Solimar Print/Director solution,
the new organization can now easily print and automatically distribute a variety
of document types to the appropriate output device, including the printing and
viewing of customer letters, correspondence, statements, and internal reports.
Moreover, they clearly understand the value of the Solimar Print/Director product
and what it has meant to their bottom line financial results. "Solimar
is now part of our strategic architecture," explains the IT Executive.
"Using Solimar Print/Director significantly reduces development time...it
is cost effective and operator friendly," adds the IT Executive. The company
recognized many quantifiable benefits from the Solimar Print/Director solution
including:
- Increased production and flexibility in using various print and viewing
data streams
- Improved efficiencies and user access to print devices and functional capabilities
- Upgraded data center value by enabling mainframe connectivity
- Cut costs and turnaround time to print and distribute documents
- Reduced development cost by viewing electronic PDF documents of Xerox LCDS
data
- Decreased proprietary dependence and costs by enabling "plug and play"
capabilities with various hardware vendors
