Founded in 1868, Universal Wilde (formerly W.A. Wilde Company) has evolved from a small publishing company into a nationally recognized leader in direct marketing solutions and personalized communications. Headquartered in Holliston, Massachusetts, Universal Wilde provides a comprehensive suite of business solutions for organizations across a wide range of industries, including financial services, healthcare, technology, and education verticals. Their personalized communication specialties include agency services, print on demand, direct mail services and fulfillment.

Solimar Systems recently interviewed Klaus Schleicher, Chief Information Officer & Senior Vice President of IT at Universal Wilde to discuss how implementing Solimar technology has drastically streamlined their document production workflow.

The slow and manual operational workflow between Universal Wilde and their clients contained too many time-consuming bottlenecked areas. The inability to process or manipulate PostScript print files caused another set of problems for Universal Wilde. Both of these challenges were found to hold back Universal Wilde’s overall productivity.

“Having the right technology to address the needs and requirements of each client is a critical component,” added Schleicher. “Helping our clients succeed in their business is a core value for Universal Wilde. When we are successful in helping our clients grow their business, everything else takes care of itself.”

“Our workflow needed a few improvements and we knew it,” said Schleicher. “Therefore, we began the process of looking for the right solution to implement that would streamline things and make us much more efficient from an operational standpoint.”

Universal Wilde’s objective from a technology perspective was to identify and select a vendor that could deliver the best overall solution to provide the following requirements:

After careful research of their technology buying options, Universal Wilde selected a software solution from Solimar Systems. Universal Wilde’s solution consisted of Solimar® Print Director™ Enterprise (SPDE), Rubika®, SOLindexer™ and SOLfusion™.

“Our goal was to find and implement software automation technology to make us become more productive,” said Schleicher. “We had a few areas where I knew we had an opportunity to improve both operationally and financially. The Solimar solution we selected to implement has proven to be a very good decision for us – not only has it met our technological needs, but it also has helped our financial bottom line.”

SPDE has given Universal Wilde the ability to accept PostScript print files from clients and easily transform them into PDF files. Once in PDF format, the document re-engineering workflow solution of Rubika and SOLindexer is used to easily manipulate the clients’ data streams.

This flexibility provided Universal Wilde the ability to process a variety of data stream conversion routines within their printing environment. SPDE also enabled workflow control and job management capabilities to help standardize their internal processes. Rubika allowed Universal Wilde to quickly re-engineer documents without reprogramming, recoding or recomposing the original source document content.

After implementing the Solimar solution, Universal Wilde discovered that the production areas that were previously bottlenecked were now streamlined. For some client jobs, the processing time was drastically reduced from 1-3 days down to 2-4 hours. “With the Solimar solution we cut our document turnaround time by 92%,” said Schleicher. “Not only were we thrilled with the processing time reduction, but our clients were very happy with us and the overall reduced project turnaround time.”

“Thanks to Solimar, our customer satisfaction levels have increased 60%,” said Schleicher. “Due to tight deadlines, finding new ways to accelerate job turnaround is critical in our business. When we can execute and deliver projects faster it helps attract and retain clients.”

Developing or writing new code to complete a project is expensive for any service provider. When Universal Wilde’s programming resources can be avoided to complete a new project, it is a desirable situation. Using software products with intuitive interfaces eliminates the need to use development resources to write new code and allows for non-technical users to work on projects. This reduces the costs of client projects and frees up technical programming resources for other projects.

“Due to the ease of use of the Solimar solution of SPDE and Rubika along with the automation it provides, we were able to reduce our development costs by 15%,” added Schleicher. “Solimar’s intuitive interface also helps us complete the projects faster and with lower skill set personnel.”

Solimar’s award winning post-sale technical support has helped Universal Wilde when they have needed it. “Universal Wilde’s experience with Solimar exceeded our expectations,” added Schleicher. “Unlike other vendors in the industry, both the Solimar products and their technical support have been outstanding.”