Are You Sure Your Invoices Are Accurate?
Every CEO and CFO would be dumbfounded to learn that the statements, bills and policies they send to their customers are quality controlled by a visual inspection of roughly 1,000 pages.
What is more surprising is that changes are constantly being requested by marketing and sales; these changes can often have an adverse affect to print stream and may not show up until tens or hundreds of thousands of pages into the print run. In the recent past, the only way to verify the integrity of high volume production printing is to print every page and look at it. No one would do this!
The products that create these documents are referred to as "composition tools." They are very expensive and very complex. They are not completely backward-compatible with previous releases. This means that every time a company upgrades to a new release of its composition tool, it must completely QC all of its production printing. New releases come out once or twice a year. Failure to keep current with the releases will find you outdated and unsupported. If you use an outsource to do printing, it will have the same problem.
Outsourcers for high-volume production printing will involve their customers in the manual QC process and get them to sign a waiver to cover their liability for any problems with the output. Failure to sign off will usually mean that you do not approve the job for printing and it will not go to production.
The Problem With Reviews
In this day and age where everyone is highly concerned with the protection of information, almost all transaction, financial and insurance documents are printed and then go out the door after a rudimentary visual review of less than 1% of the print run. This is like using spell check on only the first page of a book.
Look at what happened in Texas. The mainframe records were said to be correct and we know that the printer only prints what it is sent; therefore, one of the pre-print processes or the composition product had a problem that went undetected. One such example—at Texas’ Weatherford Electric—is illuminated in the sidebar.
A "print stream compare" utility can perform high speed comparisons for IBM AFP, Xerox Metacode, PDF, PostScript and most PCL files in a fraction of the time that a manual process would take. Using a utility such as CDP’s STREAMdiff, print streams are visually compared side-by-side with font, image and graphics changes easily identified by user-defined change marks such as circles or arrows. The cause of each difference is explained in detail and a drag-and-drop operation allows for easy acceptance of selected changes.
"We developed the technology to verify that if you make any changes to your production printing, they do not change or affect anything else in the entire print stream," states Rick Saarimaki, president of CDP Communications, Inc. "When you use this technology in the process of upgrading to a newer version of a composition tool, you will catch any changes from one version to another and avoid sending out documents to your customers that have mistakes in them."
CEOs and CFOs should know that every month some poor employee in their organization risks his or her job by signing off on something that could easily be wrong. Failure to sign off means that the statement, bills or policies do not get printed and mailed and they lose their job anyway.
The Billion Dollar Mistake in Weatherford, TX
Perhaps his $24 billion electric bill will teach Richard Redden not to leave the heat running. Thanks to a printing error, Redden and more than 1,300 Weatherford utility customers this week received billion-dollar electric bills marked as late notices.
A Weatherford Electric spokesperson said customers can expect their correct bills later this month. She said the company's records were correct and showed the right balances.
"I know they raised the rates on kilowatt hours a little bit," Redden said. "I guess we shouldn’t have run the heater quite so much this month."
—Wed Feb 21, 10:02 PM ET (Yahoo.com 2007-AP)
CDP Communications Inc., a Toronto-based software development company since 1984, is a leading provider of print stream comparison technology. CDP’s Application Programming Interface (API), ADEPT Suite, Visual Knowledge Manager and STREAMdiff products are integrated as critical components of their partners’ solutions for document composition, electronic statement presentment, content management, archiving, print redistribution and customer relationship management. Through a strategic partnership program, CDP technologies are deployed in end-to-end solutions, which address the needs of organizations in key vertical market segments including the banking, insurance, brokerage and telecommunications industries.