Background
Wright Business Graphics is one of the West Coast’s leading print suppliers. It provides state-of-the-art printed products and services that include digital variable printing, business forms and checks, secure print and mail, and other capabilities.
Wright’s Critical Communication Division (CCD) is a SOC 2 Type 2 operation specializing in the processing and multi-channel delivery of sensitive and personally identifiable information (PII) supporting multiple industries including: healthcare, banking, utilities, collections and more.
With a focus on printed first class USPS transactional mail, Wright CCD delivers high-volume, variable, critical customer communication through an automated document factory, minimizing data access and maximizing efficiencies. It commonly processes complex jobs requiring custom programming and integration, which differentiates Wright CCD from typical “mail houses”.
The Challenge
Fast turnaround times are critical for Wright CCD to meet their service level agreements (SLAs). Job onboarding and automation begins as soon as the customer’s data arrives on their secure file transfer platform. Within an average time of 15 minutes from start to finish, the workflow includes business and data integrity rule checking, CASS/NCOA processing, data transformation and composition, print file creation, ERP platform update, electronic PDF creation, and notifications via e-mail or API. Wright CCD’s standard SLA turnaround is in by 9 a.m. and out the next business day in the mail, making performance critical.
With the increased utilization of PDFs, Wright CCD’s business had evolved from only accepting various structured data formats (.csv, xml, json, etc) to accepting PDF formats. Due to the increased volumes of complex PDF files, especially during tax season, it became evident that without a high-performance automation solution to process the increase, Wright CCD will miss their customer’s SLAs.
The Wright CCD team implemented and tested various solutions to either add data from external files or extract data and re-engineer the PDFs. While these solutions were able to process PDFs, they were too slow to meet Wright CCD’s performance expectations. In fact, one solution took 3 days to process a test application on 2 servers. Wright CCD accelerated its search to find a solution to meet its complex PDF processing requirements.
The Solution
Wright CCD tested a combination of Crawford Technologies solutions, Operations Express and its component, PDF Accelerator, to run a set of complex PDF processing operations, which included optimizing and splitting PDF files as well as data extraction. These solutions met Wright CCD’s processing expectation, producing high performance, error-free results. Not only did Operations Express and PDF Accelerator permit Wright CCD to meet its SLAs, but they also did not cause any disruptions to their existing processes and workflows.
Operations Express, Crawford Technologies document re-engineering solution, increases operational efficiency utilizing its advanced document transformation engine to leverage existing production print streams to streamline print and mail production. It facilitates production optimization with integrity barcodes, extraction of valuable data and content for address cleansing, document indexing, analytics, etc. Operation Express also supports splitting large files into multiple small files to maximize device utilization and productivity.
PDF Accelerator delivers performance enhancing and flexible optimization capabilities for processing large PDFs. Extensive configuration and implementation capabilities provide the flexibility needed to optimize PDFs for both performance and size to meet specific device and operational requirements. This ensures operations, like Wright CCD, can produce high quality results at speed to maximize their operational efficiency.
Results
The implementation of both Operations Express and PDF Accelerator reduced Wright CCD’s processing of complex PDF files up to 30x in comparison to the previous solution. Wright CCD was able to split the exact test PDF file in approximately two hours without the need for a server.
According to Ty Babcox, Director of IT, Security and Compliance, “The results were significant and impressive. Time is critical when we are processing tax documents. We are measuring time in hours not days. We would have been late on a number of jobs this past tax season without Crawford. The Crawford solution reduced our processing time by over 60% percent. This allowed us to hit our deadlines and it reduced stress during a very busy time of year. That alone is worth the price of admission.”
Wright CCD were also extremely impressed by how fast and easy it was to implement the software, getting it running in less than an hour without support and then utilizing it for an optimization job the same day. They also found the support from product experts at Crawford Technologies to be exceptional. Response times from the support team were quick, 24×7. “Crawford Technologies has proved to be invaluable in helping us to meet our strict SLAs and processing requirements.”
