Headquartered in the midwest United States with revenues of nearly $900 million annually, a major service bureau serves over 14,000 clients in healthcare, financial services, manufacturing and other industries by creating and managing mission critical documents that enable their customers to operate complex businesses functions.
A leading document services provider, the service bureau uses nearly a century
of industry expertise and technology to help organizations increase efficiency,
reduce costs, mitigate risks, grow revenue and meet the challenges of globalization.
They offer consulting, technology, design, printing and staffing services to
address document needs across a customer's enterprise - from the office environment,
to the in-house production center, to externally-sourced printing.
"When document changes are requested, we no longer need the data source file. Rubika helps us apply changes plus it enables us to insert 'output intelligence' to the original files without re-composing the documents a second time."
Principal Technology Specialist
Major Service Bureau
A common challenge for most service bureau organizations is modifying existing
print-ready output files for their customers. For the service bureau these changes
were accomplished one of two ways. One method was to start the job from scratch
by securing access to the original source data file(s), making the requested
changes, and re-composing the documents over again. The change management process
is repeated for each change request and adds additional turnaround time for
both the service bureau and their customers.
The second scripting method involved transforming the original PDF print-ready
file to PostScript, interrogating the new PostScript output file and writing
new development code that allowed the requested changes to be implemented to
update the documents. This workflow required specialized skill sets, was difficult
to document, and did not allow for new technical resources to be quickly and
easily applied to a solution.
"Neither method was an efficient way to operate for us", says the
Principal Technology Specialist. "We needed to find a better way to deal
with changes made to print-ready output files."
As a current client of Solimar Systems, the service bureau was familiar with
Solimar's company reputation and industry experience. After some research by
the service bureau, it was clear that Solimar's Rubika product offered the best
solution, implementation, training and support. They discovered that Rubika
is a modular document re-engineering system that can be easily configured via
an intuitive GUI in many combinations to automate manual processes, enable postal
savings, add value to documents, and modify print data on-the-fly at run time.Using
Rubika, the service bureau now easily accepts print ready files and interrogates
the data stream to automate traditional manual processes including:
- Householding for common mail recipients
- Invoking duplex printing from simplex output
- Adding 2D barcodes
- Adjusting mailing address positions
- Checking for mailing address validation
- Splitting by foreign and domestic mail addresses
- Splitting by postal weight requirements
- Splitting for kitting and adding slip sheets
- Selecting printer trays based on page content
- Adding cover pages to mail pieces
- Merging underlays
- Embedding fonts
- Producing optimized PostScript output for printers
- Producing electronic indexed archive output for viewing
"Rubika has helped us reduce our development resource costs by 45%. Considering the number of times we have avoided writing new code because of Rubika, it provides us a significant cost saving advantage."
Principal Technology Specialist
Major Service Bureau
The Rubika solution has provided the service bureau with automated mechanisms
to manipulate and control print-ready output files. "When document changes
are requested, we no longer need the data source file. Rubika helps us apply
changes plus it enables us to insert 'output intelligence' to the original output
files without re-composing the documents a second time", says the Principal
Technology Specialist. "Rubika has helped us reduce our development resource
costs by 45%. Considering the number of times we have avoided writing new code
because of Rubika, it provides us a significant cost saving advantage."
