Headquartered in the midwest United States with revenues of nearly $900 million annually, a major service bureau serves over 14,000 clients in healthcare, financial services, manufacturing and other industries by creating and managing mission critical documents that enable their customers to operate complex businesses functions.

A leading document services provider, the service bureau uses nearly a century of industry expertise and technology to help organizations increase efficiency, reduce costs, mitigate risks, grow revenue and meet the challenges of globalization. They offer consulting, technology, design, printing and staffing services to address document needs across a customer’s enterprise – from the office environment, to the in-house production center, to externally-sourced printing.

A common challenge for most service bureau organizations is modifying existing print-ready output files for their customers. For the service bureau these changes were accomplished one of two ways. One method was to start the job from scratch by securing access to the original source data file(s), making the requested changes, and re-composing the documents over again. The change management process is repeated for each change request and adds additional turnaround time for both the service bureau and their customers.

The second scripting method involved transforming the original PDF print-ready file to PostScript, interrogating the new PostScript output file and writing new development code that allowed the requested changes to be implemented to update the documents. This workflow required specialized skill sets, was difficult to document, and did not allow for new technical resources to be quickly and easily applied to a solution.

“Neither method was an efficient way to operate for us”, says the Principal Technology Specialist. “We needed to find a better way to deal with changes made to print-ready output files.”

As a current client of Solimar Systems, the service bureau was familiar with Solimar’s company reputation and industry experience. After some research by the service bureau, it was clear that Solimar’s Rubika product offered the best solution, implementation, training and support. They discovered that Rubika is a modular document re-engineering system that can be easily configured via an intuitive GUI in many combinations to automate manual processes, enable postal savings, add value to documents, and modify print data on-the-fly at run time.

Using Rubika, the service bureau now easily accepts print ready files and interrogates the data stream to automate traditional manual processes including:

The Rubika solution has provided the service bureau with automated mechanisms to manipulate and control print-ready output files. “When document changes are requested, we no longer need the data source file. Rubika helps us apply changes plus it enables us to insert ‘output intelligence’ to the original output files without re-composing the documents a second time”, says the Principal Technology Specialist. “Rubika has helped us reduce our development resource costs by 45%. Considering the number of times we have avoided writing new code because of Rubika, it provides us a significant cost saving advantage.”