Case Study – Financial Services
National Financial Services Company
Correspondence Solution Streamlines Production and Lowers Costs
The financial services company, founded in 1889, is headquartered in the state of Washington and provides consumer credit. Its subsidiaries operate more than 2,300 offices and employ more than 55,000 people across the US. 2004 net income was $2.88 billion.
The company was using multiple systems (including UNIX and mainframe), creating a time-consuming, lengthy and expensive document publishing process, with numerous manual steps involved in the generation of customer correspondence.
The primary goals were to reduce the time and cost required to produce correspondence and to increase the use of centralized content throughout the organization. The company sought to integrate its multiple systems, and needed a solution that would provide more flexibility in the design of documents, applications and workflow to reduce document-production costs, while enhancing functionality. For increased efficiency the correspondence process needed to be fully automated.
The company installed xPression® in its Servicing division for the production of post-funding correspondence and checks, in print and PDF (for Web presentation and local printing using PostScript) formats, as well as high-speed printer capability (via Document Sciences' AFP Emitter, mainframe attached), and an email-facsimile interface.
xPression was installed on a Windows platform running WebSphere, XML, IBM's DB2 database and the AFP printing system. The solution provides two distinct web interfaces for the company: one for administration and one for document generation.
xPression was selected because of its functionality on the company's desired platform, and because it fit within the existing system architecture. Additionally, the company noted that xPression had many features that "vastly outstrip (price/performance) competitive products, as well as simplify... the components within the package."
The company has benefited from the solution's ease of use and its open platform. By updating the company's system with content automation, costs for producing documents are expected to decrease, as xPression has helped to significantly reduce the number of templates used for its documents, from more than 900 to fewer than 175.
The solution has automated numerous previously manual processes, allowing the company to reduce both the personnel needed to produce correspondence and checks, and the IT resources required to maintain and manage multiple document-generation systems.