Substantial postal savings resulting from optimized printing and mailing

Volkswagen Financial Services

Volkswagen Financial Services AG processes the financial transactions and car leasing for its four automobile brands, Volkswagen, Audi, Skoda, and Seat. They manage the complete output and print process as a service to their related companies.

The Concept

To be able to meet comprehensive print requirements of the future, including the ever increasing demands for improved print quality and layout, a new concept was developed to manage all the output needs.

The Objectives

The Requirements

The Solution

Together with Volkswagen Financial Services ISIS defined an interface to handle net data. Printer and platform independent documents are developed using Papyrus Designer.

The processing information required to calculate the postal charges, to optimize these, and to suitably merge documents, is extracted from the input data when formatting and passed to the PrintPool through the document index.

Papyrus Designer enables easy definition of the document index needed for bundling, reprinting and distribution of different document types.

Papyrus PrintPool is the key component for collection, postage optimization, and printing. Because of the great variety of tasks involved, implementation takes place using an Oracle database. This allows the print status of each document to be monitored and tracked. Any document in the print pool can be version-controlled, displayed, printed, and finally bundled for postal discounts.

The Papyrus Server automatically handles all tasks from formatting with Papyrus DocEXEC, to storing documents in the PrintPool including OMR postal machine controls.

Papyrus PostCalc uses the PrintPool tables to establish the optimal number of envelopes, calculate the postal charges, and to create print lists for each postal charge category, classified according to sorted zip codes and to sorted zip code groups. Papyrus DocEXEC Bundling application uses the print lists to extract the documents from the PrintPool database and add the post-processing information including franking information and control characters for further postprocessing (enveloping machines, franking machines, cutters and sorters.)

Certification by Deutsche Post

Papyrus gets postal information from a profile, maintained by the user, in order to easily accommodate new paper types, mail products, or postal charges. Papyrus PostCalc logs all relevant data and creates the forms that accompany the dispatched documents. Papyrus PostCalc was developed in close cooperation with the Deutsche Post.
Post-Optimization Criteria

Production printing on OCE IPDS 600dpi printers

The bundled AFP print data stream is printed to IPDS by the Papyrus Server, which controls the OCE printer directly in 2-UP mode via a Barr channel card. The envelope checking process is manually initiated by the operator after successful printing and putting in the envelopes. PostCalc establishes the quantity differential for automatic post printing. Papyrus Server prints documents plus resources to PCL with dot accuracy, then routes these to decentralized network printers.

Usage of JAVA Technology

Via the PostCalc JAVA GUI, all processing steps can be queried and manually executed including:

ISIS provides this solution on many system platforms.