Pitney Bowes Management Services (PBMS) is currently the fastest growing division of Pitney Bowes, Inc. With over 16,000 employees servicing the needs of 1,300 client locations across twelve countries in Europe and North America, PBMS has a depth and breadth of resources that is unmatched by any other outsourcing company. PBMS’ integrated services cover the entire document management life cycle including document creation, production, distribution, archiving and retrieval. While the majority of the PBMS solutions provide services “on-site” at client locations, these are also complemented by a network of dedicated off-site Document Solution Centers. The Solimar solution used by PBMS is located at their Document Solution Center in Hemel Hempstead, which processes and distributes a variety of customer communications.

Outsource organizations such as PBMS are continually challenged with a wide spectrum of client data types. Receiving information from an application source, processing the information, and distributing it to the intended recipient using disparate systems and data types is not a trivial task. This daily challenge often impacts PBMS’ ability to grow its operation.

In order for PBMS to meet their growth objectives, they identified several problem areas that needed to be addressed:

PBMS discovered that the best solution for the outsourcing Service Center is the Solimar® Print/Director system. The modular and flexible design of the Print/Director system will enable PBMS to route the majority of its print output to Digimaster 9110 digital printers, regardless of the application origin or data stream type. The Print/Director’s TCP/IP and BUS/TAG connectivity modules will help eliminate isolated technology silos by providing common gateways between host devices and printers. Legacy Xerox LCDS applications that were originally printed on Xerox printers via BUS/TAG will be easily transformed to PostScript and printed using the networked Digimaster devices. By combining the technology from Solimar with the Digimaster devices, more printing can be accomplished in less time, allowing customer applications to be delivered sooner and at a lower cost.

The PBMS staff is impressed with the Solimar Print/Director and Digimaster solution. Regardless of the incoming data stream type, PBMS will process the job for submission to one of three Digimaster 9110 printers in either PostScript or PCL. “The Solimar and Digimaster tandem complement each other very well,” claims Morrison. “All existing and new customer applications can be easily handled without any requirement for host or application changes. That saves money for both our clients and us.” The Solimar Print/Director will benefit PBMS with increased output management, while also providing additional flexibility and control in determining the final output device.

The Print/Director UI will be easy for PBMS to use by simplifying daily operations, including system administration and support. PBMS also appreciates Print/Director’s centralized management of Xerox LPS resources. With a variety of applications from multiple users, LPS resource conflicts and mismatches will be easily avoided and well managed.