Success Story De Lage Landen
Aia Software provides finance sector market leader with efficient printing and document infrastructure
The customer: De Lage Landen
De Lage Landen is a global provider of high-end financing products through a network of branches and cooperatives covering over 35 countries worldwide. The company employs more than 5,000 people. De Lage Landen’s programmes help clients boost their market share and profitability, and attain strategic objectives. De Lage Landen is a full subsidiary of the Rabobank Groep.
In today's market, with financial products becoming increasingly more complex and specific, offering consistent international services is more important than ever for a company’s survival. However, the company must also be able to provide individually tailored services. De Lage Landen’s clients often have very specific wishes and requirements for their document flow. That is what eventually drove De Lage Landen into the arms of Aia Software. With its extensive in-depth knowledge in the area of document creation, Aia Software had already been making an essential contribution to De Lage Landen’s services for over ten years. ITP is deployed both in back-office and front-office processes within the different De Lage Landen business units in Europe.
The need: insourcing document management, and outsourcing printing activities
De Lage Landen would like to link a document creation solution to its ERP system. Seeing as De Lage Landen has traditionally always worked with an external party in the US for the processing of document flows, including the gathering, sorting, grouping and sending of print jobs, it is essential that the new document creation solution can communicate with this external party's high-end printing equipment. This equipment cannot be accessed in the usual way. Optimum use of this equipment requires documents to be equipped with a code. De Lage Landen’s entire document management structure used to be in the hands of this external party. But for reasons of cost containment and efficiency, De Lage Landen now wishes to make document management an in-house affair again. This goes for both the grouping and sorting of documents, and for the full management of templates. Apart from cost savings, this will also significantly cut the turnaround time of template changes. De Lage Landen is in the market for a solution to facilitate in-house document management, offering optimum communication with the external printer’s high-end equipment.
The solution: a blend of ITP and Compart
Aia Software understood what De Lage Landen was after. In order to be able to provide a total solution, Aia Software joined forces with Compart. Compart is the company that developed DocBridge Mill, an application that helps make seamless integration of ITP into the existing printing and document infrastructure a reality for De Lage Landen. DocBridge Mill analyses documents generated by ITP, and subsequently merges them into two or three large PDF files with specific codes. Such a code will, for example, indicate whether a document consists of one or several pages. The printer will recognise the code and ‘know’ which pages can be considered as one print job. One example of the possibilities offered thanks to the combination of both applications is that documents can be grouped into a number of sheets per envelope, complete with the selected logo and house style, of course. Another advantage that De Lage Landen has gained from using DocBridge Mill is the option of using the solution as a separate service on the network. De Lage Landen has divided its IT landscape in accordance with a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Various software packages play a part in this environment. By putting DocBridge Mill on the network as a separate solution, DocBridge Mill can be called up from both ITP and other independent software.
The result
This solution enables De Lage Landen to send pre-sorted and pre-grouped batches to the external printing company. The main advantage of that is that De Lage Landen now has full control over the management of document templates. This used to be done externally, while De Lage Landen can now make any changes directly itself. This solution therefore fully meets De Lage Landen’s requirements, and helps the company realise significant time and cost savings. At present, this solution is only deployed in the US, but De Lage Landen is looking to also start using it in Europe in the long term.
Eric-Jan Swinkels, Business Liaison at De Lage Landen: “We had already had a brilliant partnership with Aia Software for quite some time. Thanks to their in-depth knowledge of document processing, we can create and adapt documents quickly and efficiently. Cost efficiency continues to be one of the main spearheads within our company, as that will help us realise our ambitious plans. Aia Software has already been contributing to that with its ITP platform. But the current project goes one step further. We turned to Aia Software with a rather stiff challenge; total document flow management. Aia Software tuned into our situation and devised the perfect solution for us by combining its ITP platform with Compart’s DocBridge Mill.”