Company Profile

Vestcom International, Inc. provides computer output and document management services to a
broad range of industries. The Company currently provides services to a broad range of
industries, including financial, telecommunications, pharmaceutical, health care, publishing and
retail and manufacturing firms. The Company believes that its services afford its customers an
opportunity to obtain improved quality, reliability and turnaround of documents, at a reduced
cost. The Company believes that its enhanced capital resources, technological expertise and
operating efficiencies will enable it to provide a broad range of services from multiple locations.
The Company intends to grow through acquisitions to enhance its geographic penetration and to
augment its existing services and customer base.

Situation
In the past, six or seven employees worked nearly full-time manually launching and directing
these processes according to hundreds of business rules. Then Vestcom put the entire series of
tasks on auto-pilot with Automate. This massive reduction in manual intervention led to major
efficiency gains, a 97 percent reduction in error rates, and the ability to respond to rapid business
growth without having to proportionally grow data center staff. And the cost was thousands of
dollars less than hiring a programmer to write code.

The challenge
Vestcom produces customized shelf-edge marketing solutions ranging from basic pricing labels
to integrated price/promotion communications for many of the country's leading supermarket
chains, grocery wholesalers, drug stores and mass merchants. The Little Rock, Arkansas-based
company generates millions of shelf-edge labels, strips, “talkers” and other items every week,
combining color graphics, text and product images to help retailers drive sales.

Customers requiring a new batch of labels or other shelf signage transmit product information
such as UPC number, item description, and pricing to Vestcom via FTP, secure FTP, VPN, or
email. Vestcom must then transfer the data to a production server, invoke two internally built
GUI-driven production applications to cleanse and transform it into print-ready files, intervene at
strategic points to apply customer-specific business rules, and send the cleansed PostScript files
to the appropriate Vestcom print center to fulfill the order.

The solution
Rejecting coding or scripting because of the expense as well as the overhead involved in
maintaining code, Evans began hunting for a business process automation software platform that
could remove the print preparation burden. Most of the products he evaluated were job
schedulers that could execute batch processes, but lacked the GUI automation and business logic
abilities necessary to perform Vestcom's complex job setup electronically.

Automate had all three capabilities, including the power to move from screen to screen and
choose from various radio buttons and drop-down menus in Vestcom's applications to enforce
customers' business rules. That would make it possible to move and rename files, take different
actions on different days, follow instructions not to print a given label if there is no UPC code
match, and so on—all by simulating manual keystrokes and mouse clicks.

Evans downloaded a trial version of Automate, used the program's drag-and-drop task builder to
compile a few test automation sequences in a matter of hours, and concluded that the software
had both the functionality and ease of use he was looking for. He and a colleague then began
compiling automation routines using Automate's pre-programmed actions and graphical
workflow designer, ultimately automating more than 300 different processes tailored to each
account's requirements.

The benefits
Today, Automate polls Vestcom servers for new customer files every few minutes and shepherds
them through the entire cleansing, reformatting, and redistribution routine without manual
intervention. As a result, Vestcom has not only reclaimed work hours equivalent to four or five
full-time employees but also eliminated the need to increase data center headcount to
accommodate company growth. "Without Automate," Evans noted, "we would have had to add
one person for each of our three shifts."

The automation strategy has also slashed data processing errors to the near-zero level and
enabled Vestcom to speed print preparation duties by running multiple processes and jobs
simultaneously.

In addition, Evans is continually adding new tasks to Automate's workload, using it for
everything from archiving data and FTPing files to pushing text files required to keep Vestcom's
production applications up to date. "We're still creating new tasks and finding other uses for
Automate almost every week," Evans said.

In other words, Automate is not only speeding the process of making Vestcom's customer jobs fit
to print, but also supporting a variety of other business processes that are fit to automate—all
without paying a programmer to make it happen. And you can print that.

Products and Services used

Software called “Automate”
 Case study in
Management
Information System

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