Business Architecture: Consolidation vs. Integration

The enterprise IT market is often characterized by fragmented products for specific applications. Although their hard-coded functionality may seem sufficient for the intended purpose it is time and again overlooked how much effort it takes to integrate them via XML and SOA.

The Business Architecture concept of ISIS Papyrus therefore provides businesses with a single consolidated information system that offers collaboration, process coordination and role coaching on top of the background data processing. This single information platform enables a business to model its key information assets, to support its process workgroups and to create and retain the knowledge about how the business actually performs its processes. All this knowledge and experience is shared between workgroups according to authority. Management can monitor quality criteria and audit each single process if needed. Because it is a single life-cycle platform, software borders do not exist and process optimization is a continuous exercise that does not require complex projects.

Enterprise architects who hope to  create an infrastructure of replaceable components by segmenting and layering various products have to consider poor compliance to standards and continuously changing products. These are major stumbling blocks for an enterprise architecture, whereas ISIS Papyrus integrates seamlessly with legacy applications to provide instant benefits with its rich functionality and platform and output channel independence. On the long term it provides an application infrastructure that allows for a gradual enterprise strategy towards consolidation with no additional integration efforts.

Avoiding Constraints Of Conventional BPM

When analysts come to the conclusion that end-user organizations want to be able to change their processes considerably faster than they actually can and add “They want to move to environments in which there’s a lot more self sufficiency on the part of the end user to configure the process,” this clearly reflects the constraints of currently used rigid process models.

To avoid such limitations ISIS Papyrus focuses on the business needs to respond quickly to dynamically changing customer requirements. The built-in process engine of the Papyrus Platform does not use simplistic procedural flowchart graphs to define the process but instead the Papyrus BPM is state and event driven to avoid problems associated with parallel activities, human interaction management and the rigid sequence of a procedure. This state and event driven process does not require complex decision blocks or listen-for-event-loops. All changes of the process are defined in the Desktop and stored in the central WebRepository.

Papyrus process management is flexible, understands the needs of users and supports knowledge-intensive business processes in combination with business communication. Users define the user interaction with the Activity Recorder and Natural Language Rule Editor and train the process sequence with the User-trained Agent. Collaboration, check-in/check-out, versioning, project management are generic platform functions. Other major benefits include:

• Less process tuning and correction because an unforeseeable event sequence does not invalidate the process
• Changing the state engine and event definition of one item updates automatically all processes using this item
• Changes of the process do not require Java coding
• No programming of dialogs required

Shaping The Customer Experience For Profitability

In mature markets with fierce competition there are usually two broad strategies to foster growth and become more profitable. The first strategy is to be price aggressive. This strategy is especially popular in downturns or to drive competition out of the market. Yet it is a shortsighted strategy and does not do much for profitability on the long run even if it may be instantly successful for a short time in growth terms. If businesses cut their margins this usually initiates a risky downward spiral. Reduced margins are often followed soon by some cost cutting, which then results in poorer service and product quality or the complete elimination of services, layoffs, still more reduced capacity of servicing customers, ensuing negative publicity and word of mouth and a long and often futile struggle to bring back margins to healthy levels.

The other strategy encompasses the shift to a customer-driven organization. Now this term is used in abundance but what is it all about? The main idea behind the customer-driven approach is that of another transformation taking place, namely from the notion of products and services as a commodity to that of shaping the perception by the customer (“the experience”) in a very particular way that is a real differentiation from the competition. However easy it sounds this transformation is not something that can be achieved overnight and it is certainly no one-off procedure.

A customer-driven approach is marked by flexibility and quality. Flexibility means an organization’s capability to accommodate different customer preferences (which may change over time); quality means that all customer communications have to be accurate, clear, consistent and relevant. Relevant communication again is personal and relating to individual context based on consolidated data. These are cornerstones in building long-term customer relationships which result in increased loyalty and revenue.

ISIS Papyrus understands the challenges large corporations face to manage processes and to produce, manage and distribute personalized, data-driven and process- related customer communications to remain competitive in today’s market. ISIS consultants analyze a corporation’s unique communication goals and then provide the tools and expertise necessary to produce high-volume, personalized paper and electronic communications that significantly improve customer and prospect responses as well as client satisfaction.

Case Study: Integration Is Key For Outstanding Customer Service

Implementing a multi-channel, one-to-one business document solution for web delivery and optional automated print

A major German bank planned to implement a banking portal as a virtual customer service branch office. Outstanding customer service by providing 24/7/365 access to personalized statements and reports was seen as indispensable. Depending on the client profile the very same document also needed to be printable in high quality, automatically enveloped and mailed. Leveraging existing business data directly from the business application on the mainframe for electronic document presentment and optional printing were a additional prerequisites.

Over all the requirements summed up to the following:

• Internet Banking document service based on existing z/OS mainframe application programs delivering the business data for statements and reports
• Display of statements and reports in the browser in PDF format
• Optional printing of same documents on different printers
• E-mail notification with hyperlink in documents on new available statements in the e-Postbox
• Around the clock access: 24/7/365

The bank in question is one of the biggest banks with branch offices in Germany, employing more than 4,000 people. The main business focus is investment and Internet banking. Other activities include property financing and services for institutions and corporate clients as well as securities trading.

For a detailed account on how this demanding project was implemented by ISIS Papyrus from document design to delivery in fairly short time and other interesting real world applications click here (PDF) .

The ISIS Times Goes Multilingual

The ISIS Times Online edition has now been available for some time and we have had a tremendous response lately. As we have offered the ISIS Times Online only in English and German we thought it was a good idea to let some languages follow suit which we have always covered with our various other publications.

Therefore we have added the following editions of the ISIS Times Online to our portfolio:

• ISIS Times Online in French
• ISIS Times Online in Italian
• ISIS Times Online in Spanish

Their content will obviously be very similar to that of the existing editions but we will certainly find the chance to announce local events and opportunities to come in contact with the local branch of ISIS Papyrus. In the meantime we hope you enjoy the most recent information about our products, features and innovative developments.

Seamless Integration For Legacy Applications

SOA is not merely a promise but rather a practical solution available today to enable organizations to re-use valuable legacy business processes for enterprise content management. Enterprises have increased focus on the usable and practical possibilities of SOA protocols for integration of content management applications across the organization.

Taking an interoperable approach – beyond mere integration – to delivering specific business value with SOA, customer-focused organizations can now use data from legacy business applications for personalized business communications that transform transactions into 1:1 interactions with customers.

Using Papyrus, changes in business correspondence require no changes in legacy applications because the platform’s metadata repository manages all access to and interaction with content from these existing systems.

Read the full story including an interesting application sample here.

Release Of Papyrus AFP Viewer

Today ISIS Papyrus is proud to announce the release of the new Papyrus AFP Viewer as free browser plug-in. This is a direct result of the collaboration with the global printing and imaging industry’s AFP Consortium (AFPC) for the benefit of the entire IT community.

The many advantages of AFP (Advanced Function Presentation) in high-volume printing are described here. The Papyrus AFP Viewer can be downloaded from the ISIS Papyrus website. A preview of the Papyrus AFP viewer is available here.

Handling Enterprise Growth Without Java

With many Papyrus Platform installations experiencing substantial growth the topic of application scalability has come to the foreground. Owing to its design the scalability of the Papyrus Platform is unlimited in principle but it is restricted by certain synchronicity needs. Simply reading or displaying documents or content from storage has no limitation, but keeping multiple write accesses in sync creates scalability issues. Clearly, when the number of users is doubled from 1,000 to 2,000 users then it does require monitoring and, if necessary, scaling of the hardware. When the number of documents or process tasks is doubled from 1,000 to 2,000 per hour that also requires consideration how that load can be safely spread across server nodes. However, scaling Papyrus Platform applications is very simple compared to, for example, three-tiered Web/Java/SQL/SOA application clusters, explains Max J. Pucher, Chief Architect at ISIS Papyrus.

User complaints about a ‘slow application’ without any measurable details do not really help, yet have to be carefully considered. Users are often unaware of different processing requirements for documents looking rather similarly. The document might be simple for the user but the back-end process can be fairly complex and proactive monitoring is advised, which Papyrus Platform provides with easy-to-use dashboards and summary reports.

Scalability is not only about tuning or maintaining an acceptable response time for a growing number of users. It is unreasonable to expect that the system will handle growth in users and transactions automatically. No system does. Papyrus has many load balancing and tuning options and many are set either by default or by the system. Document applications are a complicated conglomerate of GUI, process, and rule execution threads that read and write data from a number of service interfaces or databases. The performance of the SOA back-end service interfaces or the database is much more relevant to the scalability than the user front-end. Using common database or transaction measurements the Papyrus Platform executes millions of transactions per hour and provides substantially simplified systems management and tuning without neglecting the user experience.

The Need For A Business Architecture

The main goal of a Business Architecture as has been stated by Max J. Pucher, Chief Architect at ISIS Papyrus, is to enable the business to improve the quality of its customer services quality through transparent, flexible and adaptable business operations. Fast-paced changes in the market environment and the use of new technologies by customers have dramatic impacts on how to run a business. Some industries face changes in their calculation processes, marketing programs, business rules and content already on a weekly rather than a monthly basis.

It is obvious that the state of the communication content controls the process and not its meaningless steps. Business communication is not just a document or an email, but can be anything: a selection menu, a web page, a sticker on the document, a data record, images, or even a voice recording or video. No matter how much time and money is spent on business process analysis, there will always be one more communication item needed for a business process once it gets going. This is why collaboration tools and email are now so pervasive. They don’t require analysis to communicate.

With this in mind ISIS Papyrus has developed its Platform that does not require a huge technology stack and does not need complex programming but a simple modeling and rule definition methodology to build a flexible and adaptable Business Architecture that is mostly under the control of the business and not the IT department. Business experts can now rapidly model, measure, and change processes independently of underlying application logic. Papyrus does not require additional separate rule engines or collaborative mapping layers to enable processes to dynamically adapt to changing business needs. The collaborative ISIS Papyrus Platform approach does not restrict the business users in their execution but guides them by the process definitions, monitored by business rules and measured by goal fulfillment without the need for Eclipse-based integration between the different product fragments of one or multiple software vendors. Papyrus provides seamless consolidation of freely definable processes, rules, GUI, forms, inbound and outbound content objects.

Reaping Benefits From Green IT

Considering that according to some sources a typical office worker uses some 10,000 sheets of copy paper every year there are serious concerns about how to reduce the environmental and economic impact of this fact. Being able to deliver and store records and documents in electronic form is considerably more environmentally friendly compared to paper. Organizations are realizing that process improvements and the move from paper to electronic processes results in green benefits, such as energy savings in paper production, distribution, usage and disposition, and transit through the postal system. Other prerequisites for a greener approach in document management include:

• Strategic approach to document management efforts
• Consolidation of applications and multiple isolated systems
• Usage of content-enabled vertical applications to automate complex processes
• Reduction of wasted server time in running duplicated information

The solution lies therefore in an approach that spans the enterprise across departmental and functional barriers and in empowering users to actively create processes which connect people, information and applications across geographically distributed, organizational functions.

The Papyrus Platform with its unique business architecture delivers exactly that and helps companies to successfully leverage electronic communication with customers, partners and within their organization. Papyrus manages the complete inbound and outbound content and consolidates the related processes through a central repository without the need for manual intervention. Using straight-through processing (STP) to its full potential organizations cannot only save costs and run their business more effectively but also contribute to offset the carbon dioxide footprint.

Shifting Process Ownership For Consistent Communications

Research into consumer behavior time and again confirms that consistent customer communication is a major key for companies to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty and to boost revenue. Most people feel annoyed when receiving unclear communications that lacks personal context. The effects are costly because of possible increases in customer care calls and of companies failing to build a stable relationship with their customer base.

There are a variety of factors contributing to inconsistent communications. One of the most pressing problems is that by continually creating corporate documents from scratch, companies run the risk of producing external and internal communications that lack consistency in style, appearance, and, worse still, message. In addition, the need for variants for gender, languages, brand, branches or for new channels such as e-mail, web page, blogs or RSS feeds causes exponentially growing problems.

Another big issue for business and marketing users is continuing dependency on IT. Simple changes in text or layout for marketing messages, legal disclaimers, logos or even a new contract template can end up taking months and is potentially more costly than the business value.

The ISIS Papyrus Platform addresses these problems by giving business and marketing users control of their own processes and by reducing their dependency on IT. Customer facing staff are given the complete picture covering customer records for any outgoing or incoming communication and processing steps while all communications are automatically linked for storage in a case file. This opens the way to real multi-channel communications, reduces time-to-market, enables re-use and results in improved customer satisfaction and efficient daily operations.

ISIS Papyrus CEO Highlights TransPromo Benefits

Annemarie Pucher, CEO of ISIS Papyrus

In a recent article in leading trade magazine DOCUMENT, Annemarie Pucher, CEO of ISIS Papyrus, highlights the opportunities of engaging customers with targeted, dynamic and interactive messaging and offers.

A key requirement is the cross-functional integration of back office and front office to improve customer service, retention and growth. Ms Pucher also lists the major components for successful TransPromo campaigns and advanced features for a truly effective and 360-degree customer communications strategy.

Read the full article here.

The Case For Integrated Customer Communications

The need to save costs and to use resources efficiently in enterprise document production and to cater for customer needs and preferences across a variety of different output media has led to a rethinking of customer communications and the underlying business processes.

Traditionally, customer communication documents fall in the following categories:

• Transactional: Highly structured, high-volume, frequently recurring documents such as bills and statements. Production is made in batch for print or digital delivery.
• Interactive: Infrequent, personalized documents requiring manual interaction where custom data is entered in a given structure.
• On-demand: Event-driven occasional documents triggered by a business rule or a trained process. Examples are letters or contracts.

The problem with this isolated view is that fragmented processes are driven with island solutions using non-synchronized data with a random and incomplete view of customer data and business cases. This again leads to inefficient processes, costly overlaps and increased manual intervention and undermines the customer experience and hence affects customer loyalty and revenue.

With the unique Papyrus Platform business architecture from ISIS Papyrus, however, organizations get an integrated end-to-end solution for collaborative processing that combines data, business processes and rules and content management in a single platform to ensure consistency and efficiency across all channels and to deliver timely, personalized and effective customer communications.

Trained Processes For Dynamic Business Requirements

Conventional 2D flowchart modeling of business processes is characterized by its rigidity and lack of flexibility to adapt to changes in the business environment. With today’s dynamically evolving business requirements the maintenance of hardcoded applications is a severe limitation for business users to perform their tasks for achieving particular business goals.

ISIS Papyrus recognized this limitation when it developed the User-Trained Agent, or UTA as part of the Papyrus Platform. The patented UTA is able to learn from the actions of users based on their business roles and to later perform them automatically. This shortens enormously the time to create workflows and discards completely any additional programming and complex interfaces. If a workflow requires changes it is equally easy to retrain the UTA with a few examples instead of rewriting vast amounts of code lines. For actions that are not subject to automation like modifying or generating a letter the UTA presents a quick-start button regarding the pending activity to the user, who will then click the button to perform the appropriate action.

Integrated authorization ensures that only authorized users can create or modify activities or business rules and that these rules can only be performed within the authorization scope of the user. As a result the UTA empowers business users to adapt their workflows gradually to changing conditions and to accomplish strategic business goals without the intervention of IT.

Using Consolidated Processes For Enhanced Customer Experience

For all companies with high-volume document throughput enterprise output management is critical in a number of ways. There is not only concern about cost but also the growing awareness of the importance of a consolidated approach to content and processes. At the same time businesses discover the potential for enhanced customer experience and revenue growth lying in highly personalized, full color interactive and on-demand documents with consistent multi-channel delivery.

It is a known fact that people become more and more annoyed by impersonal mass mailings and random promotional materials ignoring their individual context and personal preferences. At the same time people do care about transactional documents of all sorts such as statements and bills. Therefore it is obvious to combine the attention for the latter with highly personalized communication that considers all available knowledge about an individual customer. A precondition for this approach is to provide a consolidated and transparent view of all the customer data and the capability to link all business data and processes to the required content.

ISIS Papyrus solutions combine all these requirements by providing data analysis and integration, advanced document composition and creation, enterprise output management and secure archiving for the efficient, cost-effective and reliable delivery of mission-critical business documents across all output channels.

Automating Inbound Communications

The great variety and huge amount of incoming documents in many businesses involves a large effort of manual intervention and subsequent data entry. These processes are not only time consuming but also highly error prone. Some studies reported that up to 75% of all documents received and manually keyed into a data collection system contained some type of error. Using capture solutions from ISIS Papyrus for automated document processing substantially increases speed and accuracy.

Papyrus Capture transforms paper documents into images and meta data. The images are associated with case files and automatically routed through business processes by user-trained or user-defined rules. Papyrus Capture provides high-capacity document capture with multiple scanning stations in distributed mail room configurations. Papyrus Capture uses automatic classification of images without human intervention through the following steps:

• Acquisition
• Index & data classification
• Extraction
• Validation
• Distribution
• Case management
• Archiving

Papyrus Capture reduces the throughput time and acquisition effort of inbound documents and delivers relevant information faster and with more reliability. It provides secure archiving and quick retrieval and includes flexible case management to optimize business processes.

Growing Business Correspondence Requires Integrated Solutions

With growing business correspondence across multiple channels the need for a centralized solution to control all incoming and outgoing communication from a single point of contact has never been more acute. Corporations require a solution that minimizes manual processing by automatic classification and extraction of vital information from incoming mail on paper, fax, e-mail and application messages. Business rules are essential for automatic routing to a business department or user to create a personalized response.

Conventional correspondence systems typically use multiple applications to capture the relevant information. Responding to correspondence can therefore require a user to access or enter data on various screens across multiple business systems. The complexity of those systems often affects accuracy and important information is entered incorrectly or is not entered at all. Customer care databases are not integrated with customer databases the business uses. There is no flexibility in adding or changing customer contact information.

ISIS Papyrus addresses these and other shortcomings by integrating incoming and outgoing correspondence during the following steps:

• Reception of input
• Classification
• Extraction
• Rule-based processing:
  - Fully automated response
  - Manual response
  - Automated response with user intervention
• Interface to CRM system
• Sign-off
• Printing/mailing/e-mailing response

Solutions from ISIS Papyrus are capable to locate all customer records and and record all user activities. Customer folders include all communications to and from the customer with each case attached to the customer file. Direct interfaces to all business systems allow synchronized customer information and the optimization of all customer-facing processes.

Automated Customer Communications With A Personal Touch

For organizations with high-volume production of customer communications it is vital to have efficient and cost-effective processes in place. ISIS Papyrus solutions have long addressed this need to leverage mission-critical transactional document production and provided global enterprise clients among others with the following benefits:

• Cost reduction and ensured compliance
• Seamless integration with existing applications
• Centralized management of all document resources
• Job level control functions for all printers across all platforms
• Intelligent document routing and scheduling
• Secure e-billing and e-presentment

However, with the increasing notion that transactional documents are a valuable touchpoint with customers they are viewed differently than before. Organizations are becoming more and more aware that customers respond to personalized documents decisively better than to generic messages inserted in their mail or sent out in bulk. Therefore data integration and analytics, advanced document composition, a single customer view and closed-loop processes to measure customer response become increasingly important.

Again ISIS Papyrus addresses this need to integrate large-scale document production with highly efficient campaigns to streamline all organizational processes for customer-facing documents. ISIS Papyrus has developed various quick-start Application Frameworks that allow the enterprise to achieve fundamental goals of creating and expanding customer loyalty, increasing revenue and optimize operations. ISIS Papyrus Frameworks consist of standard software components and can therefore be easily integrated without costly customization to deliver the following benefits:

• Approach defined target groups with 1:1 personalized mail shots
• Design sophisticated promotions reflecting the interest of the recipient
• Achieve shorter time-to-market and promotional cycles
• Enable campaign management and customer care processes
• Improve efficiency within the direct marketing activities
• Optimize customer contact center service delivery

ISIS Papyrus Sponsors IBM Event

ISIS Papyrus is proud to sponsor the 2009 IBM Information on Demand event which is held in Las Vegas from October 25-29. The event has a rich agenda which makes attendance worthwhile for business and technical leaders and experts.

The conference features programs and tracks specifically designed to develop skills, ensure higher productivity and improve problem-solving capacities and thereby leading to reduced costs and faster time-to-market. The EXPO is dedicated to innovative technology solutions under which the Papyrus Platform with its unique business architecture certainly stands out.

The Papyrus Platform combines inbound and outbound content with analytics, event processing and the relevant contextual processes. Event attendees will be able to learn how they can use the solutions from ISIS Papyrus to share some of the following benefits with over 2,000 major organizations worldwide:

• Significant potential savings in printing, equipment and postage
• Shorter development-cycles by out-of-box seamless integration, WYSIWYG and content management
• Reduced time-to-market by empowering business and marketing users to control their processes, content and templates
• Simplified compliance by process-embedded regulation and audit control
• Increased customer retention and loyalty through a unified customer view for inbound and outbound communication.

ISIS Papyrus Sponsors Xplor Event In Boston

ISIS Papyrus is proud to sponsor the 2009 Xplor Document University (XDU) program labeled On the Road and will participate in the Boston, MA, event on October 22, which is themed Trends in Customer Communications.

The program focuses on the following topics which are crucial for any organization:

• How to drive response to transactional documents
• How to reduce costs related to customer communications
• How to increase customer retention and loyalty

The program is for corporate document strategists, executives in operations and IT, business owners, content developers and anyone interested in understanding the impact of emerging applications on customer communications.

ISIS Papyrus, which is widely recognized for its eminent role in the field of customer communications and business processes, is pleased to seize the opportunity for giving first-hand insights into its unique business architecture. Over 2,000 clients worldwide use the underlying concept to optimize their inbound and outbound content and to automate and streamline the related processes by linking people, information, and applications across geographically distributed, organizational functions and helping business users to fulfill strategic corporate goals.

TransPromo: Enhancing The Customer Experience And Saving Costs

The advantages of TransPromo as a strategic marketing instrument in terms of customer retention, loyalty and increased revenue are widely recognized today. The TransPromo solutions from ISIS Papyrus have helped large organizations for over a decade to create highly personalized targeted promotional messages in transaction documents like bank statements, phone bills and invoices. With full color onserts they deliver attractive documents with timely and relevant information and save on paper and postage.

The Papyrus Campaign/TransPromo Manager provides all the tools to easily take integrated customer communications one step further and add more touchpoints to enhance the user experience and to create real multi-channel campaigns for further cost savings. Papyrus draws on an organization’s data from various information silos and brings together customer purchase history, CRM data, marketing and sales resources, customer credit history and native language for effective messaging in print, via e-mail or for Web presentment.

The automated response workflow then allows to monitor the effectiveness of the campaign and triggers appropriate responses. Customer representatives have a single view of all customer-related documents and processes and can dedicate their efforts completely to customer-facing issues.

ISIS Papyrus Presents Internet Insurance Solutions

At the Internet Insurance Congress in Bussum, Netherlands, ISIS Papyrus will present its innovative solutions for digital insurance documents. The congress will take place on October 14-15.

The presentation will focus on how leading insurance companies have been able to leverage electronic communications with customers, partners and within their organizations using the Papyrus Platform. With Papyrus they manage the entire process of underwriting and claims processing electronically without the need for re-keying or manual intervention and take Straight Through Processing (STP) to its full potential.

This is achieved by automatic closed-loop multi-channel communication. Conversations initiated over one channel like a web form submission result in an electronic policy sent by e-mail and in turn trigger a response on the same or another channel. Papyrus captures all these channels by automatically linking inbound and outbound communications for storage in a case file and thus ensures efficiency of daily operations and markedly adds to customer satisfaction.

Efficient Case Management With Papyrus Frameworks

The ISIS Papyrus website has interesting new material explaining how organizations can easily and quickly use the power of Papyrus Application Frameworks to boost their productivity with efficient management and automation of their business cases. This is accomplished by an integrated end-to-end solution combining data, business processes and rules, content management and customer communications in a single platform.

As previously reported, Papyrus Application Frameworks use the integrated Papyrus Communication and Process Platform with standard Papyrus software components. Part of the Papyrus Platform is also the revolutionary Papyrus EYE, which provides an identical GUI, behavior and features across browser and fat client for all applications without any additional programming. Of course it also benefits from integrated security, audit trail, version management, and change and release management built into the Papyrus Platform.

For more details on Papyrus case management and how it is applied for claims management continue reading here.

Enterprise TransPromo In The Limelight

A recent study by researchers InfoTrends highlighted TransPromo as “highly effective and economical method of communicating individualized promotional and educational messages by leveraging the white space on transactional documents.” In their report called The Ultimate Guide to Enterprise TransPromo Solutions: Document Composition they also featured ISIS Papyrus, thus recognizing once again the excellence of Papyrus solutions in this field.

Among the benefits large organizations can gain from a TransPromo solution InfoTrends counts the following:

• Cost-Effectiveness
• Post-Sales Communication
• E-Presentment Migration
• Incremental Revenue Opportunities
• Targeting Customers to Build Loyalty and Retention

With the unique Papyrus technology this powerful approach to marketing and customer communication is easy to implement. The Papyrus TransPromo Framework provides standard software for data analysis, campaign generation, document design and document composition, response management and multi-channel output management. Sophisticated campaign management allows for highly personalized targeting, process automation and optimization and gives marketers the necessary monitoring tools to oversee the effectiveness of campaigns and measure their  success.

ISIS Named As Leader In Dynamic Enterprise Publishing

Independent researchers from IDC have analyzed the market for dynamic enterprise publishing (DEP) software and named ISIS Papyrus as a leader in this field for consistent, efficient and cost effective document generation. The report called Worldwide Dynamic Enterprise Publishing Software 2009–2013 Forecast and Analysis: Customer Correspondence, Transpromo, and Multichannel Publishing Drive Growth provides a positive market outlook as organizations seek solutions for multichannel publishing, transpromo, and high-fidelity, personalized communications that increase customer engagement and spur revenue growth.

“DEP solutions play to three of the key drivers for IT spend, all of which affect the bottom line, including cost reduction, compliance, and new revenue generation,” said Melissa Webster, program vice president, Content and Digital Media Technologies at IDC.

ISIS Papyrus is well positioned in this area because it efficiently links inbound and outbound content to the relevant processes and helps organizations to create effective customer communications and to streamline the associated business processes across functional barriers for improved costumer care, retention and growth.

ISIS Shows Innovations in Paris

In a series of events during the coming fall ISIS Papyrus will show its innovative costumer communication and process management solutions at the Forum des Acteurs du Numérique (FAN – Forum of Digital Actors) in the French capital Paris on September 29-30.

Among the featured products and solutions will be Papyrus EYE, which empowers business users with a Web-enabled, centrally managed GUI offering the same layout and functionality as desktop applications without additional coding. Papyrus EYE is a unified RIA (Rich Internet Application) platform for all kind of applications that cover capture (scan, verify, manual correction, manual classification), document output management (interactive documents, web-to-print, campaign management and on-demand) and document management, as well as archiving, records management, case management, Automated Document Factory and management information.

Other highlights will include the unique ISIS Papyrus Business Architecture that provides seamless consolidation of freely-definable processes, rules, GUI, forms, and inbound and outbound content objects. This concept provides for transparent process optimization by user adaptation, linking people, information, and applications across geographically distributed, organizational functions and allowing business users to fulfill the strategic goals of the enterprise.

ISIS Presents Electronic Invoicing Solutions

European EXPP Summit & Forum to be held in Amsterdam, Netherlands

ISIS Papyrus will be present at the European Congress for E-Invoicing & E-Billing from September 21-23 in Amsterdam and show its innovative consolidated solutions for enterprise presentment and invoicing operations.

Organizers Billentis stress the importance of the event. “An organisation can save 1-2% of their turnover by replacing paper invoices and optimising the related processes. Electronic and automated invoice processes can result in savings of 60-80% compared to traditional paper based processing. Thus the payback time on investments in E-Invoicing projects can be as short as six months, ” explains Bruno Koch, one of Europe’s pioneers in E-Invoicing and founder of the European EXPP Summit. “In 2008, roughly 1 million European businesses and 23 million consumers exchanged one billion electronic invoices. Every day in 2009, 1,200 businesses and 11,000 consumers are expected to become new E-Invoicing users.”

ISIS Papyrus will showcase its unique Papyrus Platform and demonstrate its process optimization capabilities for outbound invoice generation and inbound invoice processing through scanning, classification, extraction, manual correction, reconciliation against purchase orders and of course connecting with other systems, like for example with SAP using the iDoc standard.

ISIS Papyrus at European TransPromo Summit

It is time to mark the calendars again. ISIS Papyrus with its proven expertise in TransPromo messaging will be present as sponsor at the European TransPromo Summit to be held in Brussels on October 6-7 this year. The event, organized by InfoTrends and 4IT Group, will bring together vendors, print service providers, and corporate marketing executives and users for 2 days of information sharing, insight into best practices through real world examples, and peer-to-peer networking. In addition, attendees will be able to meet with industry-leading vendors and service providers during the dedicated technology showcases.

“ISIS Papyrus carries a tradition of excellence in meeting customer requirements based on a unique insight into the customer-to-employee, employee-to-content and content-to-process relationships that are critical to the effectiveness of TransPromo programs,” commented Enrico Barboglio, President of 4IT Group. “Learning how they develop and deliver consolidated customer communications and process optimization solutions for their global expertise in unifying marketing messages and business content for high-impact customer communications enterprise organizations will be a great benefit to conference attendees.”

“ISIS Papyrus software connects enterprises with their customers by producing more financial and telecom documents than any other vendor in the European Union. ISIS Papyrus designed the TransPromo Manager with robust capabilities that leverage transactional processes to enhance customer acquisition, growth and retention for global enterprises,” commented Max J. Pucher, founder and current Chief Architect of ISIS Papyrus Software. “As proud sponsors of the European TransPromo Summit, we look forward to sharing real-world solutions for user-guided, personalized promotions that deliver multi-channel customer response, faster campaign cycles and optimal efficiency.”

Empowering the Business

Many organizations these days strive to cut the costs of their IT operations while maintaining their customer service quality. This may seem hard to achieve at first sight but the solution is to shift the control of business-relevant processes from IT to business users without giving up the integrity of the core systems.

This is a key idea behind the concept of the Business Architecture from ISIS Papyrus which empowers expert business users. In fact they are enabled to adapt processes as necessary with complete independence of the underlying application logic.  This allows them to fulfill strategic business goals without relying on a rigid and complex custom-coded IT infrastructure.

The approach behind this is not to restrict business users in their execution but to guide them collaboratively by process definitions, monitored by business rules and measured by goal fulfillment without the need for integrating different product fragments of one or multiple software vendors. Papyrus provides seamless consolidation of freely-definable processes, rules, GUI, forms, and inbound and outbound content objects.

Papyrus Framework for Campaign Management

Recently we reported about ISIS Papyrus Application Frameworks and their role in boosting process automation and efficiency. Today we have a closer look at the Papyrus Framework for Campaign Management and TransPromo.

The TransPromo Campaign Management Framework is a quick-start application to effectively create highly targeted and personalized marketing messages in transactional documents such as bank statements or phone bills. This powerful combination gives your message more attention than it would usually get if it were sent separately.

Based on the Papyrus Platform and its unique Business Architecture Papyrus Application Frameworks integrate all inbound and outbound content with the related processes, linking people, information and applications across geographically distributed organizational functions.  In addition, the Papyrus Campaign Management Framework provides sophisticated design tools for document creation and document composition, response management and multi-channel output management to take customer care processes to all-new levels.

Background of DOCCM

As reported earlier, a Forrester Research report on Document Output For Customer Communications (DOCCM) yielded excellent results for ISIS Papyrus and concluded that its vision in this area by far exceeds that of other vendors.

Forrester defines the term DOCCM as follows: Software used to compose, format, personalize, and distribute content to support physical and electronic customer communications and improve the customer experience.

The report then describes three application needs as part of DOCCM:

• Structured Output runs in batches, often in large volumes. Structured output is scheduled, consistently formatted, and sent as part of a service relationship (much like phone bills and brokerage statements); it also includes batch digital or offset print runs.
• Interactive Output marries custom content or data with preset structure. Interactive output requires the human touch, often matching variable customer data with structured forms or templates, providing a more individualized output; examples include customer correspondence and negotiated documents like group insurance policies or derivative and margin contracts“.
• On-Demand Output is triggered by multichannel requests. Events from the Web, fax, phone, email, transactional systems, or enterprise applications drive on-demand output, and on-demand events may also be initiated by a human being via a keystroke, as in call center correspondence.

As all these areas are very well covered by the Papyrus Platform business architecture with its concept of consolidated processes in the context of inbound and outbound content the positive results come as little surprise. To read this interesting report in detail request your copy now from ISIS Papyrus.

Driving Process Automation with Frameworks

Process automation is still a key competitive factor in many industries. Yet many large organizations find it hard to cope with the abundance of business communications and the growing complexity of the related processes.

Therefore ISIS Papyrus offers a number of quick-start application frameworks for use with marketing, content management, document management, web presentation, printing, customer correspondence, marketing administration and customer care processes.

Papyrus Application Frameworks are based on ISIS Papyrus standard software and are usable across most business verticals. The Papyrus business architecture of consolidated  processes in context with inbound and outbound  content, business rules and much more achieves the automation of business processes and the creation of collaborative workflows without the need for  lengthy projects and substantial custom coding.

The following Papyrus Application Frameworks are currently available:

• Account Opening
• Claims Management
• Contract Management
• Customer Response Management
• Campaign Management
• Business Correspondence
• Automated Document Factory

Future articles will present them in more detail and describe how various industries can use them to optimize their customer-facing processes and to streamline internal cooperation across functional barriers.

Papyrus Application Scalability

There are now over 200 installations of the Papyrus Platform. Half of those serve hundreds to thousands of users. The others manage high-volume production systems. Most installations handle between 10,000 and 100,000 inbound or outbound document tasks per day in either straight-through processing or user-interactive mode. All these installations continue to grow and thus application scalability is becoming a common theme. Adding new applications is so easy that users tend to forget that possibly more HW resources are necessary to handle those processing needs. We propose a pro-active monitoring approach using our integrated monitoring and reporting facilities.

The Papyrus Platform offers unlimited scalability but applications have to be properly defined taking such scalability into account or they have to be accordingly updated as the application grows. Often restricted networks or other limited resources require tuning measures to ensure acceptable user response times.

There are two discussion posts available for your further reading:

Welcome to the Real World: Overhead: Java Application Scalability

Chief Architects Blog: Papyrus Application Scalability

The Forrester Wave: Papyrus is a ‘Strong Performer’

Forrester Research has just published its Forrester Wave – Document Output for Customer Communications Management report.

Analysts Sheri McLeish and Craig Le Clair have spent a lot of time to analyze the current market offering in this arena. For a vendor to participate it was necessary to offer enterprise class functionality in interactive, on-demand and structured document creation. No overall leader emerged and the ISIS Papyrus Platform was positioned as a strong performer in the same league as all the large vendors who offer no more than a mix-and-match patchwork of often incompatible functionalities in difference to the architectured ISIS Papyrus Platform.

“ISIS Papyrus by far owns the broadest vision for DOCCM in the industry,” stated The Forrester Wave™: Document Output For Customer Communications Management (DOCCM), Q2 2009. Forrester defines DOCCM as software used to compose, format, personalize and distribute content to support physical and electronic customer communications and improve the customer experience.

The ISIS Papyrus Platform v7 was reviewed in The Forrester WaveTM as follows: “ISIS scored well as a Strong Performer across all segments and as a well-balanced product with enterprise potential. ISIS Papyrus has the broadest and most unique vision for DOCCM in the industry, supporting ECM, CRM, analytics, event processing, and BPM. It has a modular and easy-to-configure system based on patented technology that combines with innovative post composition, output management, and production management.”

Forrester also reviewed reference installations and stated: “Customers are committed to the ISIS vision and feel passionate about this vendor.”

It is an interesting report so we recommend to purchase it from the Forrester website. Alternatively contact ISIS to receive a complementary copy. You will find a more opinionated view here.

Integrated Communication is Key to Customer Satisfaction

Annemarie Pucher, CEO of ISIS Papyrus

In a recent article on DMNews Annemarie Pucher, CEO of ISIS Papyrus, highlighted the importance of integrated communication for enterprise CRM.

Ms Pucher outlines common problems of CRM systems in the corporate world. They are often purchased and run in isolation while customer information is in fact widely dispersed across applications and functional and departmental borders. This affects heavily the timeliness, accuracy and efficiency of customer response and customer care and ultimately customer satisfaction.

The obvious solution is the holistic approach to technology and processes taken by ISIS Papyrus: Centralized incoming and outcoming communication, single point of contact and a business architecture that integrates applications easily. Empowered business users get the chance to control the complete lifecycle of CRM applications and related communication to give customers the well-timed and relevant response they deserve to keep them happy and loyal.

Tech Updates for TransPromo and ADF

Just in time for the Open House events in Vienna, Austria and Southlake, TX, technical updates on TransPromo and the Automated Document Factory (ADF) have been released. As reported earlier, ISIS Papyrus leads the innovative edge in these areas which are critical for customer-oriented enterprises with high-volume document production requirements.

Transpromo and ADF are two application frameworks defined for the Papyrus Platform. They can be used independently or as elements of a consolidated communications and process infrastructure that is the target for the Papyrus Platform. In difference to Java-coded component solutions the Papyrus Frameworks are easy to maintain as they do not contain any Java-code, and they are easily adapted using the Template functionality of WebRepository.

The consolidated approach of Papyrus enables seamless functional cooperation of otherwise distinct products such as ECM, BPM or CRM that would have to be linked up by means of SOA. The problem is that this usually requires the development of new business processes and new user interfaces while in Papyrus that is not the case. With Papyrus EYE the business can define the user interfaces as required, record and train the processes, and write the relevant business rules. Papyrus empowers the business user in a completely new and transparent way.

Incorporation of AFP Consortium

Creation of New Standards Organization – ISIS Papyrus Joins Forces With Major Industry Players in Continued Innovation Endeavor

In February, the Advanced Function Presentation Consortium (AFPC) has become an incorporated non-profit organization. It also celebrates its fifth year of operation focused on promoting industry innovation, interoperability between its 30-plus members and collaboration on mission-critical standards. The group was formed by leaders in the print industry in October 2004 to focus on developing the AFP Color Management Architecture (ACMA), an open standard to drive accurate and consistent color in variable data printing. This focus was expanded in September 2006 to encompass the complete AFP architecture. AFP is a presentation architecture that provides for document and information presentation independent of specific applications and devices. This technology is particularly important in driving new industry initiatives like TransPromo and in the creation of mission-critical documents such as bills, statements, and policies. AFP has powerful advantages over other print architectures like PostScript as it supports very high print speeds, output integrity, and centralized, automated server-based management.
The leading role of ISIS Papyrus in these technologies was recognized by electing Roberto Anzola, head of R&D, as member of the board of directors who will run the newly-formed body.

User-Trained Agent in V7

Real-Time Chart for UTA

The User-Trained Agent (UTA) enables the business user to gradually design a workflow by training. This kind of training is not suited for the sequential entry of data and threshold values. In conventional workflow systems developers have to provide this functionality via forms, script logic and business rule systems plus the programming of complex interfaces.

The Papyrus WebRepository lets the user create metadata definitions for interactive Activity Recording (AR) and the entry of business rules in natural language without the need for scripts and without programming efforts. The integrated authorization features restrict the creation and editing of business rules to users with appropriate rights and make sure that execution of the rules is strictly within the boundaries of user roles. The UTA can be trained to perform activities but their scope is limited by defined business rules.

Announcing ISIS Papyrus 2009 Open House and User Conferences

ISIS Papyrus is pleased to announce this year’s open house and user conferences to start at the ISIS headquarters in Vienna, Austria, from April 19-21, and Southlake, Texas, from May 3-5, respectively.

Registration for these exciting events is now open. Other venues include Kingsclere in the UK and Ivrea in Italy. We will present all the details as they evolve.

In terms of products, ISIS Papyrus regards 2009 as a vintage year because quality rather than low-priced mass production guarantees happy customers. If the vintner hands you the bottle with a handshake you know what you are getting. We have shipped V7 to our project customers and to those who had a functional need. Papyrus EYE has been convincing with fully functional proof of concepts for prospects with a specific GUI design in a few weeks. Chart graphs in combination with our reporting features enable intuitive dashboards and process monitoring. New user-interactive Role-Activity views offer perfect insight into process functionality for the process owner, manager and user. The Papyrus User-Trained Agent has been accepted as a new means to create processes without stumbling over rigid flowcharts.

The Papyrus Platform V7 offers now a consolidated environment that enables the business to create all business processes with content, views, and rules from the Business Architecture down, while connecting to backend applications. The three letter acronym fragments (ECM, CCM, BPM, BRM, …) that would need to be integrated with expensive SOA projects and additional BPM and GUI coding, can now be consolidated and phased out.

The opportunities for short term and long term savings are substantial.

NLR – Natural Language Rules

Business users need to quickly and easily add and modify business rules for the processes that they own to either comply with changes in market conditions, business principles or regulation. The Papyrus Query Language (PQL) of the Papyrus Platform is extremely powerful but was not designed to be used by business users. The NLR Editor provides the business user with single-edit-line rule entry that enables clear text, syntax free entry of business rules that are structured according to predefinable rule patterns. The NLR Editor uses the context of the business case as functional scope and will suggest access to metadata attributes based on that context. The user can neither access data that he is not authorized for nor can he make a mistake in using attribute names. The rules are entered in a national language of choice supported by the translation collection and stored in a language independent format. Rules can be entered in one language and edited in another as long as the rule keywords are available in the Papyrus WebRepository translation collection. The executable format of the NLR is a PQL rule object and is therefore fully compatible with normal PQL scripts.

Papyrus Activity Recorder V7

The Activity Recorder (AR) lets users automatically add routine activities like the addition of new customers or the changes of customer data to the context of a business case. This makes complex scripting of forms and the underlying logic dispensable. Once activities have been recorded users may modify and fine-tune them. Changes in the metadata object of the repository are considered automatically and therefore running the AR requires no changes to the activity as such. The GUI language of the activity is activated at the same time as the translation functionality of the Papyrus WebRepository. Activities are provided as generic functions in a library or assigned to an abject type as tooltip method. As all activities are executed along the same principle users need no extra training for certain forms.

Transpromo Delivers Increased Returns

The combination of transactional documents like statements or bills and promotional material, in short: Transpromo, is an efficient vehicle to raise customer attention with targeted offers for increased loyalty and profitability.

ISIS Papyrus has covered the underlying functionality of highly-personalized top quality documents for quite some time before Transpromo became a catch phrase. This innovative edge is now proven again by the ready-to-go Transpromo framework that comes with the Papyrus Platform. Making use of the revolutionary Papyrus EYE User Interface and the unsurpassed ADF capabilities of the Papyrus Platform this solution demonstrates just how far you can go in customer-oriented marketing.

The upcoming ISIS Papyrus Open House is the ideal opportunity to see live demos not only of Transpromo but of all other highlights built around the unique business architecture of the new Papyrus Platform.

Annemarie Pucher on the Fort Worth Business Press

Annemarie Pucher, CEO of ISIS Papyrus

In a recent interview for the Fort Worth Business Press, Annemarie Pucher, CEO of ISIS Papyrus, explains how Papyrus solutions help businesses defy the current crisis.

Giving business users a sophisticated front-end and helping them to automate manual processes makes them more productive, Ms Pucher says. She also notes that the Papyrus Platform and its unique business architecture empowers users to control key business processes which reduces dependency from IT and allows them to focus on customer service.

Read the full interview here.

ISIS Papyrus Excels in ADF, Study Says

Papyrus ADF Dashboard

The ISIS Papyrus Business Communication & Process Platform addresses the consolidation of fragmented  applications by dynamically managing content and processes. For a global enterprise this means linking systems, applications and staff that are spread around the world and busy around the clock.  Papyrus Platform delivers advanced functionality in a broad range of enterprise applications which are artificially segmented into ECM, DAM, CRM, BPM and so on. This has also been recognized by a recent study from leading research firm Strategy Partners.

Their study covered specifically the modules of the Automated Document Factory and was appropriately called “Innovation in Automated Document Process Management“. Their most prominent conclusion was that ISIS Papyrus is the sole software vendor who covers all the modules of the ADF 2.0 and therefore provides complete independence of any hardware or operating system. Study author Oscar Dubbeldam will reveal background information at the ISIS Papyrus Open House and User Conference. There will also be presentations and live demonstrations of ADF and other applications, discussions with management and solution architects from ISIS Papyrus, networking opportunities and much more you would not want to miss.

Interesting Opinion Poll on LinkedIn

How do you rate global financial enterprises in the world economy?

• Indispensable!
• Important, but too influental.
• Ok, but who needs them?
• Acceptable, but not desirable.
• They caused the crisis …

To answer and for results go to LinkedIn Polls here:

Invitation to the Open House 2009

ISIS Papyrus invites once again to its well-respected Open House and User Conference. These events are held in Vienna (AT), Dallas (US), Kingsclere (UK), and Ivrea (IT). Once again there will be five ways to participate: Speeches, Workshops, Hands-On Demos, Case Studies and Group Discussions. Dates and more information on the ISIS Website.

Chief Architect Max J. Pucher will most likely entertain the audience with his politically incorrect views. Like a proud vintner he personally vouches for the quality of his 2009 vintage of Papyrus V7 with the fine undertones of the latest features. Papyrus EYE is likely to be his most amazing creation as it enables the setup of business defined GUIs in just a few days. That even includes dynamic graphics, tables, charts, and dashboards. The subject of his keynote speech will be the impact of an enterprise business architecture. He proposes that it enables the consolidation of BPM, CRM, ECM, BPM and BI without the need for SOA (that can be used for further backend apps). EYE should however not push the amazing User-Trained Agent on a sideline.

Questioned on the impact of the crisis, CEO Annemarie Pucher said: ‘We can all be frightened by the media into deepening the recession by doing nothing. Neither bailouts nor regulation will stabilize the economy but just a faith in the future. This is what we want to convey!’

-> EDI

Papyrus EYE Dashboards

Using the graphical capability of Papyrus EYE in v7, it is now very simple to create dashboard panels that can display any data query from the system or from applications. A simple PQL query can read system statistics, real-time transactions or resource consumption, live business data, process managemant statistics, campaign or customer relationship management information and present them in a choice of charts.

Papyrus EYE Dashboard

The dynamically appearing real-time charts are a lot more flexible and easier to use than in MS-Excel. With this capability the Papyrus Platform establishes itself as a full-function process management suite and is in terms of graphics presentation as powerful as any business intelligence product.

->MJP

Questions about XSL-FO?

Recently there was quite some noise about the position of XSL-FO for professional enterprise applications. Here is a list of information resources that will help you to gain a better understanding of the subject:

• The Truth about XSL-FO by Max J. Pucher
• XSL-FO on Wikipedia
• W3C XSL Specification
• Amazon: XSL-FO by Dave Pawson
• Amazon: XSL Formatting Objects Developer’s Handbook by Doug Lovell

The ISIS Papyrus Platform can import and export XML formatted data and content definitions through its XML Adapter. XML formatted data can be passed through either MQ or SOAP/WSDL.

The ISIS Times is back!

Hello World from the ISIS Times – Online Edition.

For many years we had the ISIS Times as the mainstay for communicating with our customers. Later we started to produce the ‘Technology Innovation’ series of brochures and ‘The ISIS Times’ sort of fell asleep. Because of recent requests for more current, up-to-date information about our products we have now restarted ‘The ISIS Times Online’ edition. We will possibly also take information from this online publication and put it in print form and mail it. Some of it will be duplicated from our website but typically condensed and in a more informal reportage style format in this online magazine. We look forward to your frequent and recurring visits.

Feel free to email your requests to times.editor@isis-papyrus.com.