...the heart of Xplor
Chicagoland Chapter Events
Review of
March 16, 2007 Meeting
90 people (pic1) attended this meeting. Terry Johnson (pic2) introduced AIIM and Xplor and Paul Fisher (pic3) introduced COMA.
Mike Maselli, Böwe Bell & Howell (pic4) spoke first on “Documents – What Happens after they are printed”.
How smart is your document? How do you define a document Lifecycle?
• Pre - print can change what is done with the document after it is printed.
• Print.
• Post – print.
• Customer delivery.
How can you improve capabilities before printing?
• Add barcodes.
• Add sequence numbers.
• Postal changes.
• File formatting – PDF; HTML; XML.
Optimize Inserters by changing Set Order to gain a 5% to 30% speed increase.
Original Set Order:
A1 B1
B2 C1
C2 D1
E1 F1
New Set Order:
A1 D1
E1 F1
B1 B2
C1 C2
• Create Control Files.
• Optimize Sort Scheme.
• Set Postal Connectivity.
What can you do with your document?
• Job Tracking.
• Inserter Tracking.
• Printer Tracking.
• SLA Management.
• Item Tracking.
• Stock Tracking.
• Chargeback Reporting.
• Postal Reporting.
• Increase Operator Productivity.
• Automate Reprints.
Customer Service:
• Fast and secure access to inline document images.
• Months or years of statements managed.
• Web access to USPS tracking details.
• Secure web portal for departments/companies to track their job activity.
The next speaker was Karen Bieringer, United States Postal Service (pic5) speaking on, “How to Use a 4-State Bar Code to Create a Smarter Document”.
The 4-State Bar Code is the latest offering under the USPS Intelligent Mail Program and will be required to receive Automation Discounts in 2009. This bar code is also known as the Intelligent Mail Barcode. “4-State” refers to the 4 different lengths of the vertical height of the bars in the code (Full, Tracker, Ascender, and Descender). The 4-State Barcode combines the data of the existing POSTNET barcode, used for sorting, and the PLANET CODE barcode, used for tracking or other value added services with letter or flat mail, into a single barcode.
How do mailers benefit from the 4-State Barcode?
• Has greater overall data capacity than existing barcodes.
• Provides more digits for use allowing unique identification of up to a billion pieces per mailing.
• Provides more accurate and detailed information about mailings.
• Increases mail piece “real estate” by eliminating the need for multiple barcodes.
• Allows for participation in multiple USPS service programs with a single barcode.
More information on the Intelligent Mail Program is available on the Rapid Information Bulletin Board System website: http://ribbs.usps.gov/OneCodeSolution/
The next speaker was Corey Olson, Metavante (pic6) speaking on,”CSF and Intelligent Document Design”.
The aim of a holistic Customer Communications Management System is to:
• Provide the right content.
• With the right personal information.
• For the right reason.
Design Considerations:
• Provide relevant content.
• Do you use color?
• Meet customer preferences.
Trends:
• 63% of customers surveyed, preferred transpromotional documents over documents with stuffed inserts.
• Documents with stuffed inserts have the worst response of only .21%.
• Full color digital transpromotional documents are forecasted to grow by 91% thru 2010.
• The number of organizations using Highlight or Full Color in 10% or more of their documents increased from 19% to 31% in 1 year.
• E-document use is up, but they are not replacing printed documents.
• 39% of online households receive statements online, but only 8% of those people don’t also get a paper statement.
Components of Intelligent design:
• Design through the customers eyes. How they read and get information from the document.
• Align the document strategy to marketing segmentation.
• Involve and empower business users in the design process.
• Integrate the use of multiple distribution channels ( E, Print, Achive) into the document design.
• Reduce costs.
A Customer Communications Management System should enable the following:
• An easy to use design interface with a GUI similar to Microsoft Word.
• Collaboration and Re-use.
• Integrate Message Management.
• Importation of content from various sources.
• WYSIWYG document testing of print and electronic outputs.
• Version control.
The next speaker was Scott Houck, XMPIE (pic7) speaking on,”The Effectiveness of Cross Media Documents”. XMPIE is a wholly owned subsidiary of Xerox Corporation.
With XMPIE software solutions, you can build effective marketing campaigns from end-to-end. For the first time, you can easily create and produce highly personalized marketing materials for commercial print, e-mail, and the web using a single software solution.
One-to-One marketing has been the dream, but the reality has been the problem. While one-to-one marketing has been possible for some time, it hasn’t been easy to combine the different elements of complex databases, flexible document designs, commercial print production and web-based media. Digital printing was expensive, slow, and limited. All too often results weren’t cost effective.
Today, the information revolution is generating information-rich customer databases. Digital printing is now affordable, fast, and effective. Put them together, and you have the potential for creating end-to-end, fully personalized marketing campaigns that provide highly relevant and targeted content to the individual, en masse-and consequently the potential for unparalleled recipient response rates.
The PersonalEffect suite of components allows you to:
• Access local or remote databases.
• Establish flexible business rules to drive document personalization.
• Provides a plug-in to the Adobe Creative Suite used by most designers.
• Provides true WYSIWYG proofing by allowing designers to scroll through a sample of recipient records and view the document design while variable text and graphic elements are automatically populated with each changing recipient.
• The design, data, and business logic are stored separately and are merged automatically producing personalized documents for each person in the database. You can make last minute changes quickly and easily, reprint successive campaigns with new data, new recipients, or changes to design.
Print personalized direct mail postcards that include a call-to-action to respond to a promotion with personalized URLs (example: www.abcde.com/John.Smith) that produce a personalized web page which tracks which users responded, when, and how often. Send a follow up print campaign to the qualified population that responds on the web; then send personalized emails with a PDF attachment that complements the printed campaign. A second follow up campaign can be sent to a PDA or cell phone using SMS Text Messaging.
The next speaker was Mark Paul, Böwe Bell & Howell (pic8) speaking on “Vision Systems – how to Manage the Document”. There are various types of Vision Systems.
Readers:
• Limited to like symbologies.
• Has limited peripheral abilities.
• Supports only 1 input.
Smart Sensors:
• A camera system hybrid.
What makes up a vision system?
• Can read in 1 dimension or 2 dimensions.
• Can read postal OCR patterns.
• Special codes are built-in.
• Supports multiple inputs.
What are the differences between Area Scan and Line Scan system?
Area Scan:
• Captures moving or stationary images.
• Lower cost.
• Has limited field of vision.
Line Scan:
• Requires a moving image.
• Can capture an entire document.
A Document Vision System can help to maximize:
• Document Control Data.
• Document Personality.
• Archival needs.
1. Document Control Data: Multiple control regions can be combined.
2. Document Personality: Matching common elements together that make each document personalized.
3. Document Integrity: Data required ensuring accurate document production and providing an audit trail. Sequence verification; format verification; address verification; postage verification.
4. Document appearance: Print registration; verify Logo fits pattern.
5. Document Quality: Data required to verify the documents are meeting processing standards. Postal Barcode analysis; Skew & Pitch.
6. Document Archival: Documents can be imaged, in the background, for archiving.
The final speaker was Joe Pigeon, Paloma Print Products (pic9) speaking on, “Intelligent Document Testing”.
Who benefits from Document Testing?
• Service Bureaus.
• Insurance companies.
• Financial companies.
• Mutual Funds.
• Utilities.
Document Application Testing consumes up to 60% of a Document Creation Project.
Current Testing:
• Consists of manual document comparison and analysis.
• Takes a lot of employee time and corporate money.
• Manual testing doesn’t catch the errors.
Automated Document Testing basics:
• Automated document testing reduces the time required, cost, and error rates.
• Requires a program for automating the testing process.
• Must compare “pre-change” and “post-change” files.
Paloma Print Perfect™ is a high-speed print stream comparison software tool that automates document application testing. Paloma Print Perfect™ performs the tedious and labor-intensive task of comparing two print streams, but does it in a fraction of the time consumed by manual testing. This results in lower document test and production costs and increases customer satisfaction by allowing for more thorough document application testing.
Paloma Print Perfect™ compares print streams down to the pixel level and then visually displays them in a side-by-side fashion with font, image, and graphics changes clearly identified by user-defined, color coded change markers. In addition, because Paloma Print Perfect™ analyzes the underlying print stream format – AFP or Metacode for example, - it provides the user with a detailed explanation for each document change.
By inspecting the visual output of a “pre-change” file and a “post-change” file, Paloma Print Perfect™ quickly and effectively identifies expected changes and also ensures no unexpected changes have occurred. A detailed list pinpoints the exact location of items that have changed. Drag and Drop selection of accepted changes provides an automated mechanism for iteratively reviewing and tracking changes and monitoring the acceptance testing process. In addition, Paloma Print Perfect™ creates an audit trail report for each document it processes.
Paloma Print Perfect™ benefits:
• Increases the productivity of document creation/testing teams and reduces developer costs.
• Document applications can be tested more thoroughly, which reduces document errors.
• Shortens document composition software upgrades by minimizing the need for manual document testing.
• Provides automated testing workflow- via the unique PowerSWITCH module- which enables users to quickly and easily define, document, and automate not just the print comparison testing step, but the entire document testing process.
• Simplifies and speeds migration from one document composition solution to another, because Paloma Print Perfect™ is not dependent on the document composition software used to create your documents. For example, “pre-change’ files can be created using one document composition software solution, and “post-change” files can be created with a different document composition software solution.
• Reduces document time to market – document application testing will no longer consume up to 60% of your document project hours.
• Lowers paper, toner, and print labor expense by virtually eliminating the need to print volumes of paper for manual inspection.
• Eliminates the need for multiple testing tools in companies using AFP, Metacode (including limited DJDE support), Postscript, PDF, and PCL output formats – Paloma Print Perfect™ supports each of these output types.
• Simplifies the upgrade process for other core software – such as Operating Systems – by minimizing the need for manual document testing.
The Leadership of AIIM Wisconsin, COMA, and Xplor Chicagoland Chapter wish to thank the respective members who attended the meeting and the support of this meeting by Böwe Bell & Howell.
For a PDF copy of these notes, click on the icon. 