Ode to a Document

Documents are the universal tool for communicating to anyone and everyone. They are often the first impression and constant touchpoint to our coworkers, customers, vendors, and partners. They are not limited to the traditional print device or fax server as they were in the past. They can be presented in our beloved PDF, a Portable Document Format. A term that is often underestimated. It remains our collective tool, displayed on nearly any device, with consistency and accuracy, including a mobile phone, tablet, laptop, or large monitor. It can be posted online, emailed, archived, and yes… even printed. So, Documents are not going away; they are just evolving. But remain a critical vehicle for nearly every business process.

Documents Still Important

A Legal Record

Sometimes, You Still Have to Print

Print May Be Diminishing, But Documents Evolve

The insurance industry runs on documents. Various locations, regulatory, and situational versions make document management a momentous task in any insurance organization. Common documents produced by insurers include quotations, policies, statements, reports, renewals, reminders, checks, remittance notices, and statutory letters. Insurers must meticulously manage and constantly update these documents because of regulatory changes and market forces.

The insurance industry is predicated on paper. Or specifically, on transactional and reference documents. Insurance companies handle many transactions in both printed and digital formats. When customers buy an insurance policy, the insurer often sends PDF documents to their email inboxes and duplicate printed versions to their postal mailboxes. These communications are the only immediate confirmation that customers bought something costing hundreds or thousands of dollars. The documents customers receive are important and should not only explain the coverage but also be easy to read. The documents have value, and insureds should keep them for reference if they file a claim.

Regulation Adherence, CX Challenges

As a highly regulated industry, insurance firms are especially careful to make sure the legal department approves all the documents they produce, but repeated document review requests made necessary by manual processes are costly. Inefficient document systems often force groups or individual employees to handle document maintenance on their own. Under these conditions, version control and branding are at risk. State-specific rules may force nationwide insurance providers to support 50 versions of a document. Keeping all regulated documents current and compliant is a big job.

Insurance providers have the added challenge of working across many departmental silos to create a unified customer experience. Entities such as marketing, underwriting, product groups, and legal departments all have different objectives and responsibilities that influence how they communicate with customers. Legal must be certain the language is correct and the description of the insurance product is not misleading. Marketing is concerned with brand consistency, upselling, cross-selling and other promotional offers. All the variables insurance firms encounter make regulatory compliance and customer experience management a challenge.

Dynamic Data-Driven Documents

With data driven-document software like DocOrigin from Eclipse, insurers can modify document templates with a minimum of IT intervention. Departmental stakeholders can react to market or regulatory changes using a single dashboard or interface. A central repository contains the data required to print policies, invoices, or promotional documents. The software pulls the data as needed, based on business rules, during the dynamic printing process. Centralized data sources accessed by templates enable employees to update the stored data just once to implement changes across all relevant documents, for all departments. This eliminates the need to find and update documents and “one-offs.” Companies can maintain document accuracy, regulatory compliance, or consistent marketing messaging across all printed and digital material.

Businesses set rules so managers or department heads must approve document revisions. An individual user may have permission to change a document, but the changes are not made permanent until approved. Various levels of “rights” give management the power to control access levels according to employee roles in the organization.

A central repository is also important from a postal point of view. Since most printed documents enter the United States Postal system, current, valid, and standardized mailing addresses are necessary for effective delivery. Approximately 15 percent of all U.S. residents move each year. Move updating programs such as National Change of Address (NCOA) improve the deliverability of transactional and marketing documents. Maintaining “clean” addresses in a single, centralized database accessed by all mailed documents improves deliverability and allows insurers to take advantage of significant postal discounts.

The Visual

Current print technology allows companies to print high-quality documents including variable graphics, color, and fonts. Insurance consumers expect quality printed documents. The pages represent the product they purchased and build trust and awareness. By leveraging the power of data-driven documents, insurers can operate more efficiently and remain in compliance while simultaneously making their documents easier to understand.

Companies often include trans-promotional content in data-driven documents. Promotional content connected to individual customer data provides terrific marketing value, but the marketing messages cannot overshadow the main document content, which is often a legal document. Colors, fonts, graphics, and messaging should not mislead or confuse customers.

Once a document template is set, users can only change the content authorized by managers or allowed by business rules. Fonts, font sizes, colors, graphics, and layout all stay on brand and follow the directives of each departmental stakeholder.

Eclipse supports many insurance industry customers. With our software, insurers eliminate the complexity and overhead associated with maintaining an overwhelming number of documents. See this case study for an example of how DocOrigin is a perfect fit for highly regulated and complex applications like insurance.

Maintaining compliance with regulations that dictate the format and content of documents (many of which are rarely read) is a constant challenge in many industries. Regulation updates require companies to find all affected documents, in every version, and determine the software that created them. The next step is locating a subject matter expert who works with the necessary software and can make the changes. Following approval, organizations move the documents into production and if printing is a requirement, they make an appointment for press time for a visual quality control check.

One way to lessen the compliance burden is switching to data-driven, rules-based document templates that centralize document composition and simplify document maintenance efforts triggered by regulatory changes. Compliance then becomes much more automatic. Regulated document updates can come on quickly, and organizations can’t waste time deciding how to approach the problem. They have to react rapidly to implement regulated changes before mandated deadlines arrive.

Maintaining the Regulated Format

Compliance sometimes requires companies to reproduce documents exactly as the government-issued originals. Organizations would like to use their favorite document composition tools, but preserving fonts, line spacing, or line length with a preferred composition engine can be challenging. The documents could fail a light-table match. The government has good reasons for establishing standard formats. The forms could be used by millions of people. Variations would be a disaster. Some organizations find it necessary to maintain old software to deliver the necessary consistency.

Government agencies use OCR technology, as do banks and insurance companies. These agencies extract data from the completed forms. Adhering to government form designs and updates allows for scanning process automation, driving efficiency and reducing errors. In most cases, documents must adhere to government’s specifications exactly to confirm continuity and consistency across multiple industries and geographies. 

What Is Regulatory Compliance?

Regulatory compliance is when an organization adheres to state, federal, and international laws and regulations relevant to its operations. Examples of regulatory compliance regulations include The U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation of 2016(GDPR). 

Governmental compliance is not the same as corporate compliance. Corporate compliance is adherence to internal, self-mandated rules. Both are important. 

Why is Regulatory Compliance Important? 

• Fines and Loss: Recently Hilton Hotels paid $700,000 to state regulators, Nationwide Insurance paid $5.5 million in fines, and Target paid $18.5 million to settle regulatory actions and claims.

• Reputation: Regulatory compliance protects an organization’s assets and reputation. Reputation and trust with customers, prospects, and vendors builds over time and cannot be easily fixed if compromised. Compliance is a central part of corporate policy. 

• Trust: Compliance is part of foundational corporate ethics. Trust that took years to solidify could be lost because of a single compliance mistake. 

Central Repository Hub and Document Management

A centralized document management system provides cross-referencing and collaboration between required departments. It improves workflow as it dictates who should review (and fix) each document. Documents are more secure as updates managed under a single point of supervision have a lean chain-of-custody. When regulations change, many departments come into play to assure compliance. A list includes the manager of the affected department, HR, legal, compliance officer, operations, and form design and printing. The form must be exact to government specifications to fulfill legal obligations and communicate the change effectively. 

Document Design and Printing

Minimizing postage and processing costs makes good business sense. The best option is merging required government documents with a planned customer mailing. This reduces costs and customer confusion. With the right document composition software, companies can “stitch” government compliance documents into the page set as part of a scheduled mailing.

Reproduction is time-consuming and the minutiae can be significant to a government regulator or scanning device. The same could be said for highly regulated industries such as insurance or banking. When sending printed or PDF documents, organizations must be sure they use the correct versions in every instance, and that any changes to the documents comply with the official requirements.

New Federal Administration

Any governmental administrative change, regardless of party or politics, is sure to stimulate a government modification and compliance changes. Are you compliant from every angle? Not just legal, HR and operations, but also getting that information into the hands of customers, patients, or members according to government guidelines? A centralized document management strategy minimizes the exposure to fines and non-compliance actions, and assures customer satisfaction by accurately communicating updated information. 

Companies buy fast printers and are then dismayed when it seems to take forever to get their documents produced — especially during those busy times when page volume spikes. Why is that?

Several factors determine the speed at which completed pages exit the printer, but the most common cause of slowdowns is inefficient data files the printer must process. If you’re sending poorly formatted PDF data to the printer, it could take too long to process through the raster image processor (RIP). When that happens, the print engine slows down as it waits for the RIP to produce the printable data it needs to put toner on paper.

One factor to keep in mind is that specifications for PDF files can change occasionally. If your document creation software is working with a different set of specifications than the RIP, you could experience processing delays. Make sure all the components of your document creation and production workflow are operating with the latest versions of PDF.

Fonts

Failing to embed fonts in PDF files is a common error that can increase data processing time on the printer. It can also cause pages to render differently from the design. When referenced fonts are missing, the RIP attempts to substitute fonts in the documents with fonts available to the printer, and they may not look exactly the same.

Occasionally, designers create font outlines in their documents. This technique turns text into vector graphics, which also take longer to process.

Other conditions that cause print throughput issues are identical graphical elements repeated on every page, defining the same fonts with different names, overuse of transparencies, and poorly structured font character sets. All these issues can cause printers to stop and wait — a productivity killer, for sure.

Transactional Documents

For high volume personalized documents such as bills or statements, use the PDF/VT standard. Transactional documents typically include features like logos, lines, and boxes present on every page. With PDF/VT, these items are rasterized once and stored. PDF/VT relieves the RIP from processing the same data page after page, which makes a big difference in RIP speed.

Graphics

Graphics are frequently a problem area. Document design software makes it easy to import large graphics and then re-size or crop them to fit the available space on the document. But the data sent to the RIP includes the original graphic size. You can avoid sending extra data to the printer by re-sizing graphics to your desired dimensions before importing them into the document creation software. You also needn’t go overboard on graphic resolution. Printers typically render graphics at 300 dots per inch (DPI). Including graphics at greater than 300 DPI just gives the RIP more data to process — with no improvement in print quality.

Poorly constructed PDF files can even cause slowdowns on printers that aren’t running the job! If your print center is configured so that several printers share a dedicated RIP engine (also known as digital front ends, or DFE’s), extra time dedicated to processing an inefficient job can take resources away from work running on a different printer, making it stop and wait.

Send Less Data

Minor imperfections in PDF files may not seem significant, but time wasted on every page add up fast for high-volume jobs. An extra tenth of a second spent processing every page in a 50,000-page job means the print output will be available over an hour later than expected. The faster the printer and the bigger the job, the greater the impact of PDF processing delays. To drive a roll-fed inkjet press at top speed, the RIP has only a few milliseconds to process each page.

PDF/VT takes care of some issues by eliminating redundant processing, but it does not fix everything that can slow a printer. If you experience print delays, start by examining the data within your PDF files. Most times, you can make minor modifications that have no effect on the output quality yet significantly impact performance.

“We don’t have just one document system, we have many. We’re paying for the same functionality over and over.”

“Our IT people don’t like to be bothered with making document changes. They have higher priority items on their to-do list.”

“The business line managers are frustrated because the documents aren’t the way they want them, and they can’t get them changed.”

“Every time regulations cause us to update our documents, it’s a huge, time-consuming project.”

• Changes require expensive and in-demand IT resources that may not be available for months.
• New customers or applications force you to create a new set of static templates, thus adding to an already expansive template library.
• Your software makes it difficult to communicate in all the channels your customers demand (or worse, you must buy separate software to support each output channel).
• Business units can’t add data-driven marketing or personalized messaging to increase the value and effectiveness of transactional documents.
• Your document system has become unreliable and could cause you to miss deadlines or neglect regulatory commitments.

HINT: IT’S PROBABLY LESS THAN YOU HAVE…

Many documents used by in-house document operations and print service providers are very similar to one another. Differences in colors, logos, company names and addresses, or signatures may vary, but the general purpose and layout of the documents is much the same. When document designs are the same, organizations gain efficiencies and cost savings such as using a common outbound window envelope or combining small jobs into larger work units.

In a typical environment, when changes are necessary, companies must modify hundreds of document templates – and hope they don’t miss any.

Let’s take a print/mail service provider that specializes in credit union account statements as an example. The service provider could maintain separate statement templates for each of their credit union clients, however it is likely that these documents are all formatted similarly. Credit unions commonly use software supplied by a small number of vendors, so the data that appears on the statements is much the same from one credit union to the next.

If they were using DocOrigin from Eclipse Corporation, the service provider could create a single template driven by Profile Files to create branded documents for all their credit union clients that share a common format.

DocOrigin Profile Files control the logos, color palettes, languages, and other variables that might change among client documents.

Why would a print/mail service provider or an in-house document operation want to take this approach with their documents? It’s all about efficiency and productivity.

Suppose new government regulations forced every credit union to add disclaimer language to their statements. If the print service provider defined each document in standalone templates, they would have to change each of them manually, one at a time. With the DocOrigin Profile Files approach, mandated changes need be made only once, in the master document that produced all credit union statements.

Producing all the statements from a single template based on parameters allows document operations to combine documents from several clients into a single print job. This strategy has become desirable as companies transition to high-speed inkjet print devices at the same time that transactional document print volumes are dropping. Print operations can merge documents from several clients into a single print job, which reduces set-up times and keeps high-speed presses running at top capacity.

Documents controlled with Profile Files reduce the risk of accidentally producing materials bearing obsolete information. Fewer templates to support means organizations have more control over updates and versions. No longer will companies worry about using outdated logos, taglines, or executive signatures because they neglected to update a template in their vast document library.

For a demonstration of how to use Profile Files for reducing document template inventories, watch this video from the Eclipse video collection.

Most organizations communicate via documents in multiple languages by creating and maintaining parallel document templates. As the document library grows, the task to update and maintain all the templates becomes increasingly time consuming. Modifying templates for wholesale updates, such as address changes or a branding refresh, can turn into months of extra work.

A better approach to multilingual documents is to create a single template that supports multiple languages according to values in a data file. Document composition systems such as Eclipse Corporation’s DocOrigin® insert the correct language text when the document is created. This method ensures document consistency across all languages and drastically reduces template library volumes and maintenance efforts.

The indicator that controls the document language is included in the variable data that drives each document. This is important when companies wish to communicate according to the language preference chosen by each customer. An example might be utility bills for a region that includes many Spanish-speaking customers. When customers open an account, they choose either English or Spanish as their preferred language.  Since the utility company maintains the language tag at the customer level, it can print consecutive documents in various languages and keep the pages in the most efficient sequence for finishing and postal presorting.

As they create document templates, document designers define sections to include static header and footer information, variable text, captions, column headings, and large text blocks to accommodate each supported language. The document composition software selects the proper elements as it creates the documents during production.

In situations where a document center needs to produce all of a company’s or division’s documents in a particular language, DocOrigin customers define a company profile that not only indicates the language preference, but may also control signatures, contact information, logos, or color schemes. This method of document design allows organizations to quickly onboard new entities while maintaining document format consistency and enabling production efficiency and automation.  Company profiles eliminate form design redundancy and decrease testing time, since organizations can test design assembly on a single template. Pre-production quality assurance teams can verify the language and content variations without also inspecting design elements.

See How It Works!

Maintaining duplicate document templates in multiple languages is a hazardous practice. This method makes maintenance more difficult and time-consuming, and it increases the risk of expensive mistakes. Neglecting to update the foreign language version of an English document can cause a company to generate high volumes of erroneous print with outdated content. Obsolete terms and conditions, for instance, can have serious negative effects. Such errors are difficult to spot and could affect several document production runs before the company discovers the mistake.

It may take a little longer to configure data-driven documents to be generated in multiple languages. But companies will reap the benefits of such an approach for the entire lifespan of the documents. With sophisticated software like Doc Origin, companies can generate customer-friendly communications, reduce calls to customer service, maximize document production efficiency, and lower the risk of distributing large volumes of error-laden foreign language documents.