With more than 60 years experience, Cathedral Corporation is a high quality provider of personalized and variable print and Web ePresentment services for customers in several industries: banking, credit unions, healthcare, investment management, non-profit, government, telecommunications, utilities, higher education and churches. Employing approximately 160 people, Cathedral services its customer base from facilities in Rome, NY (Corporate Headquarters), Lincoln, RI, and Cheektowaga, NY. From design to delivery, Cathedral has the proven expertise and state-of-the-art resources to handle all print and electronic document presentment needs, while offering a 100% Quality Guarantee to its customers. Solimar Systems recently interviewed Marianne Gaige, Cathedral President/CEO and Mary Keating, Cathedral, VP of Information Technology to discuss how implementing the Solimar Enterprise Output Management System has automated both its production print processes and Web ePresentment capability.

With multiple operational sites, Cathedral found it increasingly difficult to manage and coordinate workloads of its production print facilities. They realized that the lack of automation was slowing production, while significantly increasing operational costs. At the same time, they wanted to offer their customers an easy way to search, retrieve and view online electronic documents from anywhere on a 24/7 basis. Unlike some organizations that generate electronic documents by printing and manually scanning, Cathedral wanted to find a solution that was automated, efficient, and without manual operations.

After evaluating offerings from several vendors plus their own internally developed systems, Cathedral chose to implement an Enterprise Output Management System and Web ePresentment Solution from Solimar Systems. The cornerstone component, the Solimar® Print/Director system was implemented to control the data center environment by ingesting a variety of data streams, transforming and optimizing the data, and providing digital workflow control by efficiently managing the output devices. The feature-rich Solimar Print/Director system was so robust that it replaced an internally developed application and a legacy connectivity server. The SOLscript™ product was implemented to process their Xerox VIPP® applications. SOLsearcher™ Enterprise was implemented to serve as Cathedral’s Web ePresentment system. SOLsearcher Enterprise is a powerful and highly secure web-based document distribution solution that indexes, stores, searches and retrieves large collections of electronic transactional documents. “As a result of the Solimar solution, we are now able to use an automated process to produce PDFs directly from the print stream,” states Mary Keating.

The product combination of Solimar Print/Director, SOLscript and SOLsearcher Enterprise is the optimum software suite for Cathedral’s requirements. “At Cathedral, we view Solimar Systems as a strategic partner rather than a vendor,” says Marianne Gaige. “When working with us, they have shared their industry knowledge, experience, and technology to help us automate our business processes. As a result of our cooperative partnership with Solimar we are reaping the benefits of an integrated, customer-centric approach to personalized communications,” adds Gaige. The Solimar Print/Director implementation has enabled Cathedral to eliminate manual workflow processes and reduce its labor costs for its production print business. “The Solimar Print/Director implementation is saving us an average of 30 hours per week in labor alone,” says Keating. “Saving over 1500 man-hours of labor per year translates into a significant amount of cost reductions, and that money immediately impacts our bottom line results.” The SOLsearcher Enterprise implementation has enabled Cathedral to avoid 20 man-hours of programming time for each Web ePresentment application. “By not having to allocate our programming resources to develop each new application, it allows us to use our programming staff in other critical areas,” states Keating. According to Keating, Solimar’s technical expertise and knowledge have contributed to the success of the implementation. “Since the Solimar solution has been in place, our experience with the technical support team has been very positive and especially helpful.”