AMF Impresion Variable S. A. was founded in 1945 in Chile by Alfredo Molina Flores (AMF) and has been a leading printing solutions company for more than 60 years. AMF specializes in developing full-service print solutions, including the design, printing and business forms management of a wide variety of print communications for their clients.

AMF currently operates two plants in the Macul district of Santiago de Chile, where more than 45 million documents are produced annually to support business processes and logistics of major clients such as department stores, major financial institutions, banks, government agencies, and major manufacturing companies in Chile.

AMF’s vision is to become a strategic partner with each of its clients by producing printed documents that support business transactions and critical operations. AMF is known for delivering personalized service, developing professional products and completing projects on time.

Solimar Systems interviewed Alvaro Diaz, General Manager at AMF to discuss how implementing Solimar technology has allowed them to reduce AMF’s business processing costs while increasing their overall output production.

AMF identified several areas within their internal production workflows requiring technology implementations and improvement. The operational limitations that AMF targeted to improve were:

With the operational limitations identified, the primary area of concern for AMF was its ability to accept a wide variety data streams and processing them to create printed documents for their clients. The data streams often needed to be transformed into a file format that was compatible with their printers. “Our data stream transform process lacked automation, flexibility and options,” said Alvaro Diaz, General Manager at AMF. “Our workflow also contained too many manual steps and was too time-consuming. As a result, it was slowing down our output production and extending our clients’ project completion dates,” he added. “We needed to automate the areas that would provide us the most benefit and offer us the greatest improvement.”

AMF believed that acquiring the right technology from the right vendor would allow them to overcome their production challenges and accomplish their operational goals. After a search of technology and vendors, Solimar’s software solutions were determined to be the best overall product suite for AMF. The combination of Solimar® Print Director™ Enterprise (SPDE), Rubika®, SOLsearcher™ Enterprise (SSE), and SOLfusion™ was chosen by AMF.

SPDE has allowed AMF to print to multiple printing devices simultaneously. It performs multiple data stream conversion routines on essentially all print files. By supporting combinations of inputs, outputs, and conversions, SPDE gives AMF a powerful print manager that transparently connects host systems with their production printers. “As our requirements grow, we can add software modules, install additional inputs and outputs, or upgrade to take advantage of new features and capabilities,” said Diaz.

AMF’s Rubika and SOLfusion implementation is a modular document re-engineering workflow solution that has automated previously manual processes. Rubika’s modules can be configured in many combinations as needed to enable postal savings, add value to documents, and modify print data on-the-fly at run time. Changing documents without having the need to re-compose them is a real time saver for AMF. “Using Rubika, we can manage and re-engineer PDF files by inserting OMR marks, adding barcodes, scaling content, insert underlays and many other modifications,” said Diaz.

SSE is the next solution AMF plans to implement. SSE is a powerful and highly secure electronic document delivery and web presentment solution that will enable AMF to effectively index, store, search and retrieve large collections of transactional documents. Also commonly used as an effective re-print solution, SSE is designed for users to securely access critical business documents and reports via the web. “SOLsearcher represents the next stage of our solution roll out plan at AMF,” said Diaz. “We are excited to enable document web presentment capabilities to complement our print processes.”

The Solimar solution suite has made a positive financial impact at AMF. Using Rubika and SPDE, AMF’s requirements for development resources have significantly been reduced, resulting in major labor cost savings. Client jobs are now being completed faster allowing more work to be done in a shorter period of time. “The Solimar solution has reduced our labor expenses by 15% and accelerated our normal project turnaround time by nearly 20%,” said Diaz. “Client jobs are now being completed faster and at a lower cost.”

Using the intelligent automation functionality of the Solimar solution, AMF has eliminated several manual operational steps that were both slow and costly. Recurring operational processes that once required human intervention now are performed using automation functionality within the Solimar solution.

“With the built-in software automation, the Solimar solution has increased our overall output production by 15%,” added Diaz. “The extra production provided by our Solimar solution has allowed us to increase our capacity without increasing our costs.”

The SPDE and Rubika implementation have proved to be a very good decision for AMF. Once the electronic document delivery solution using SOLsearcher is implemented, the full Solimar system will be in place. “Even though we have not yet implemented all components of the Solimar solution, the financial benefits we are receiving have been very rewarding,” said Diaz. “So far we are very pleased with the performance and results we have seen. We are excited to bring the SOLsearcher product on board next.”