| AXA Colonia Insurance in Cologne, Germany
searched for a document solution for their new
24 hour Customer Care Center. A number of
requirements had to be met, mostly related to
automation of the letter generation on a server
as well as letter collection and sorting for batch
printing in the evening. These are not just typical
letters, but they can be any kind of document
required such as the Green Card, the European
International Insurance Certificate and/or sales
related documents. 
Papyrus had already been used for other applications
and Mr. Tenfelde started off the project with
ISIS consultant Ursula Prancz in April 99. The
first test with a document was defined and the
procedures for the postal processing of sorting,
bundling and writing the OMR code were defined.
This was done in May 99.
The customer application writes a request file
to the Papyrus Server which then kicks off the
appropriate document. To merge the data into the
document the Oracle interface of Papyrus DocEXEC
is used. Only the data needed for each document
is read and the application does not need to know
which data is required for each document, as this
is defined with the document itself. In June the
first set of documents was defined and tested
for production.
The formatting run also writes a control record
into the PrintPool log, which is used to track
each document and control the sorting for the
batch process. Once the daily document requests
have reached a certain number the operator can
manually request a print job and Papyrus will
then perform all the bundling and sorting. The
actual documents have already been generated and
in principle a number of servers could be used
to generate documents in the network and the bundling
will collect the documents from all servers in
the network. The operator can - if he wants to
- verify the result with the Papyrus Client and
then submit the job to central or network printers.
One of the main reasons to choose Papyrus, was
the speed of document development and once a standard
framework of building blocks was defined it was
very easy to reuse these and define new letters
in just a few hours. As the volumes grow Colonia
expects to use not just NT but maybe other servers
and also a number of different printers as well
as the high-speed printers in the data center.
Platform and printer independence were therefore
a key criteria for long term investment protection.
On the first of July 1999 the project went live
and a number of documents are being added to the
library on a regular basis by the administration
personnel at Colonia.
Given the scope of the project:
Fast development environment for complex documents
Data integration from the Oracle database
Distributed server based production with preview
Central bundling and sorting
OMR coding and enveloping
Printing to any kind of printer with full fidelity
... everyone at AXA was very surprised and
pleased that they could go into production after
just three months with very little internal manpower. |
