Generating 680,000 Documents Per Day

Today, Oct 2004

Dutch Mailing House Delivers in Japanese

The Dutch fulfillment company, Millennium Direct, specializes in the printing and processing of mail. It collaborates closely with its business partner, a direct-marketing firm, which has clients all over the world and passes orders to Millennium Direct for fulfillment. The company generates millions of pages of documents each month using printers that are in operation for over 16 hours a day. Millennium Direct also offers a range of other services, including mail processing and data management, together with follow-up activities, such as customer and telephone support.

Millennium Direct wanted to expand its print capacity further as part of a continuing program of customer service improvement. Adding an IBM roll printer to the existing cut-sheet printers was the next logical step in this program. These printers are extremely powerful and capable of producing huge numbers of prints per hour. Yet, while large print runs presented no problems for such high capacity printers, Millennium Direct's existing software struggled to cope with the high workloads.

"The result was that the printer sometimes stopped completely and the projected net return on the roll printer - 340,000 A4 sheets or 170,000 A3 sheets per day - was far from being achieved," explained Andre Weening, commercial director at Millennium Direct. "At first, it seemed this was going to be a difficult and very time-consuming task."

Millennium Direct prints a million Japanese mailings every month, so it also needed a software package that could process Unicode as well as print 'data matrix codes'. These are 2D barcodes that record full client details and bank account numbers, so that orders and returns can be processed and stored in a database quickly and easily.The Solution

Millennium Direct uses StreamServe Business Communication Platform (BCP) specifically for processing outgoing documents and information flows. "We previously relied on several different industry-standard packages, but now have something much better. We now control our printers faster and more effectively and we can process much larger quantities of information too," said Weening.

"Our IT staff had very little work to do during the implementation. This meant they could focus on what they do best - safeguarding network continuity and readying our clients' address databases for printing," said Weening.

The Results

The automated solution now performs a key role in Millennium Direct's business processes and Weening has consequently been impressed by the returns. Our clients send us documents in PDF or Word formats. Previously, our processes involved several separate conversions to ensure the right documents reached the correct printers," said Weening.

The existing conversion processes occupied the time of planning staff and print operators. They had to perform manual checking to ensure that the files had been converted correctly and that the printers were controlled properly. They also had to divide print jobs into batches by hand.

"Our old software could only send a limited number of records to the printers in a single print job, so one print job would actually consist of many small batches" said Weening.

The flexibility StreamServe BCP offers also opens up the future opportunities too. With the solution, Millennium Direct can now generate color prints, illustrations, a sophisticated 'print on demand' feature or even electronic services.

"We can easily expand our fields of operations into, for example, producing mailings by e-mail," said Weening, who estimates a 12-15 month ROI. "While we could have employed additional staff and bought new hardware to increase our printing capacity, this would have cost much more in the long term."

"We can now offer clients a higher quality of service. Previously, we could not have produced a million mailings per month in Japanese - it took our computers days to process a Japanese mailing of about 100,000 records. A million print run would have been unthinkable."