At a time when IBM and Ricoh have agreed a deal that will see IBM’s printing systems division become a fully-owned subsidiary of Ricoh in 2010, an IDC survey shows that 95% of all information is still processed in paper form – with 45 sheets of paper being printed on average each day per employee.
Whatever else, it has come to be realised that the paperless office is a myth. There will always be paper around, whether it is that long email that has just been printed out so it is easier to digest, hard copies of key documents for compliance purposes, or advertising promotional materials. However, as well as sustainable forestry, what’s good for the environment is both to use less paper and to manage existing paper-based or linked processes much more efficiently. This is the realm of enterprise content management, ECM.
It may be surprising to learn that 80% of all business information is trapped in unstructured documents such as correspondence, emails, web pages, PDF files and paper contracts. Unlike structured documents, the location of important information in an unstructured document is not known ahead of time and cannot be easily predicted. With something called classification technology, however, it is possible to detect common structures and so automatically classify and extract information from unstructured documents. There are systems today that can classify fixed layout documents (forms) and variable layout/content-rich documents (correspondence).
According to research by Harvey Spencer Associates and Dicom Group, the global market for information capture and communications is valued at $1bn and growing at 18% per annum, triple the growth rate of the IT market. The ECM market meanwhile is valued at $4.5bn and growing equally rapidly due to technology convergence.
Some of this may be ‘finger in the air’ stuff, but whether companies heed the projections or not, it is a fact that there is a lot happening in the field of information management – and companies that take notice can enable the automation of business processes by collecting paper documents, forms and e-documents from throughout the organisation, transforming them into retrievable information and delivering it all into line-of-business applications, databases and archives.
‘Print is an essential part of any IT infrastructure,’ says Roger Christiansen, IBM Printing Systems Marketing Manager, UKISA. ‘Many business processes depend on timely and accurate printed output. Total office print volume is growing at an average of 20% per year. According to Gartner, organisations typically spend 1% to 3% of their revenues on print.’
So how do you turn printing infrastructure from a major expense and drain on productivity into a cost-effective business communication strategy?
‘Deploy printing solutions which help not only to control and contain printing costs, but also to implement smart solutions which enable users to manage print effectively to improve customer satisfaction, employee productivity and business continuity, move from paper-based to electronic documents and leverage the vast amounts of information locked up in the form of paper, images, videos, email, invoice statements, presentations and reports,’ says Christiansen.
While the printing division does ‘significant’ business with System i, IBM (of course) doesn’t break out figures. ‘We do everything from simple consolidation of printers up to top-end cost/page models,’ he says.
Cassie Olmstead of healthcare document specialist BlueWare, says: ‘Patient charts are found in numerous locations throughout a hospital. Often, records are kept off-site because there isn’t enough room to house the massive heaps of paper. Our product, Wellness Connection, is a solution for handling all this paper as well as the unstructured data, or multimedia, which is a part of a patient’s entire medical history.
‘Currently, most healthcare enterprises cannot implement a full patient-centric approach because disparate information systems prevent the user from having readily accessible patient information. Therefore, hospital staff are hard-pressed trying to find information contained within several different silos of information. Wellness Connection on System i provides a foundation to unite all the disparate systems to facilitate a common language with a single patient view. We’re notching up successes in the UK now.’
Some ten years ago, David Culley MD of Next Solution Ltd was managing director of BOS Better On-line Solutions and helped launch PrintBOS document design and routing software into the UK.
‘PrintBOS was designed to work with spooled output files so it was transparent to the user, didn’t interfere with the ERP system, and didn’t incur upgrade charges when the ERP system was upgraded,’ says Culley. ‘Now, PrintBOS is owned by Consist, a larger global mainframe software R&D company. Today PrintBOS has a customer base in the UK and globally from small businesses to large banking groups.’
New features include the ability to link to other applications at run time and merging the data into the document, but not as an attachment. A module saves up to 50% of toner and inkjet costs by optimising ink usage without degradation of quality.
‘One customer has worked out he can save £18,000 per annum, which pays for the solution in a short time,’ says Culley. Next Solution (formerly DC Associates) has installed PrintBOS software throughout the UK. PrintBOS offers routing to any Windows printer using the actual properties of the printer, email, fax, browser-based archive, SMS, and so on. ‘We’ve added a PowerPoint presentation on our website for anyone to view the solution without sales interference, and offer free monthly presentations in the Midlands for a half-day,’ says Culley.
Business Partner SpaceTec offers a full electronic data management suite for System i, providing workflow solutions for printing, faxing, emailing, PDF security, scanning, electronic web applications and output to XML.
SpaceTec customer Bibby Financial Services had chosen System i as its preferred operating platform as it has many different locations and a need to guarantee customer confidentiality and application availability. A number of Bibby’s core financial services companies needed to produce customer documents of a set format and layout. Printing was historically done onto pre-printed forms using an application which overlaid the data onto pre-printed stationery in the correct positions. This took place on a server running at one of Bibby’s locations. Extending this to allow other companies within the group to utilise the same facilities would require the installation of a server and software at each location.
Bibby turned to SpaceTec for advice on overlay printing and the use of its System i. SpaceTec recommended the company deployed InterForm400, an output management solution designed for System i. This enables the formatting, distribution and archiving of System i documents and provides standard tasks such as automatic merge of documents from the spool file to form, plus additional benefits such as a form designer allowing the creation of any type of form with no assistance necessary from the vendor. Another feature is the ability to create PDF documents and distribute them as email, reducing postage costs and labour time.
By using InterForm400, Bibby has been able to reduce costs. The product is installed on the System i at one location reducing the need for separate servers and software at multiple locations. The company estimates that it has saved two-to-four days per site of engineer time for the installations. It has also increased bandwidth efficiency and print speeds.
Malcolm Spence-Herbert, Bibby’s project manager, says: ‘Apart from the flexibility InterForm400 provides in the production of forms and documents from System i, we’ve also made significant cost savings against the software and hardware we would have needed to replicate the legacy server solution.’
Pat Race, managing director of SpaceTec, says: ‘We have many customers using InterForm400, most of whom now also use additional modules. Without exception, all of our InterForm400 customers have made cost savings and now have a more reliable and stable platform to work on. Cost-effectiveness is achieved very quickly indeed.’
InterForm400 is a modular product, comprising a number of different applications for System i. Additional modules allow users to merge data with documents created in any PC word processor, distribute documents directly to fax, instantly archive copies of documents, and create and distribute secure PDFs ensuring only the intended recipient can view the information.
IBM Business Partner Logicmate is also a UK distributor for InterForm400 where John Northrop co-director says: ‘We market InterForm with a number of complementary utilities including a Documents-on-Demand feature that provides browser-based access via user-defined indexes to PDF output generated from InterForm. We’re finding considerable interest in Documents-on-Demand from our customer base in three main areas.
‘One allows customers and suppliers to have browser-based access to relevant documents. Nippon Express provides access to airway bills via the web. Another provides internal access to documents, eliminating the need to print and distribute hard copy. A national bank has eliminated all internal reports. Another replaces legacy archive solutions. A major vehicle importer is currently replacing its legacy GTOS/Optical based solution.’
Eric Figura, BCD marketing director, says: ‘We offer Catapult and Nexus Portal, which combined have over 2,000 installations -- with numerous UK clients. We handle the full spectrum of report and document management through Catapult and integrate Catapult with Nexus ECM to handle archiving/indexing/retrieval/securing with different levels of access/scanning and indexing plus allow the inclusion of documents and objects from any other server other than iSeries -- Windows, Linux or Unix -- to be added to Nexus ECM with search indexes for a more complete solution.
These solutions are sold independently or together to form an integrated solution. Catapult sells for about £2,500 and Nexus Portal is a free licence for the cost of annual maintenance.’
For archiving and retrieving System i spool files (in addition to many other forms of content), IBM Software Group offers IBM Content Manager OnDemand for iSeries (more at http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/ondemand/400) .
‘This is the “common server” version of the product in that the same product is available across many different platforms, but it shouldn’t be confused with the previous generation green-screen product,’ says Julie Maw, technical sales – System i Family, IBM systems & technology group.
Konrad Litwin at eveLogic says: ‘Robot/REPORTS provides a total solution to the problems of iSeries report management. It can cut the number of pages printed dramatically, eliminate costs of bursting and sorting reports, transform report archives from piles of dusty paper to easily-accessed storage media, and safeguard company confidential data.’ The company offers free 30-day trials, and numbers many FTSE companies in its customer base.
Symtrax’s Sumeet Raval says: ‘It’s difficult for organisations to move away from paper-based documents. However, it’s important to draw a line between what information needs to be on paper and what in electronic format. Most of our customers using our Electronic Forms solution are applying formatting templates to fixed and variable layout spool files which are then printed on A4 sheets using desktop printers or emailed to their customers in PDF format.’
Well, ECM appears to be the stuff of the future. Until the market matures, there will be plenty of scope for output management as practiced by customers and vendors today.
Frank Booty is System i NEWS UK's industry reporter.
This article first appeared in the March, 2007, edition of System i NEWS UK magazine.
