Company-to-Customer:
Enterprise Output Management in a Newly Networked World
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For the past 25 years, businesses have relied upon computer technology to generate print streams and printed documents. These documents -actual printed pages- were critical to each and every step of the business process. Invoices, receipts, statements, and a host of other printed output were important for company-to-customer transactions, as well as communication within a company. And until recently, this information was printed, managed and distributed by hand to its patiently waiting recipients.
Now it's the twenty-first century, and while many things have changed, one thing hasn't... print streams and documents still drive the enterprise. But with today's technology, the process can be streamlined and globalized for the new generation of inter-networked companies. A company may now transmit and receive ""printed"" documents online, but the basic business structure stays the same.
To illustrate, suppose companies from all over the U.S. place orders with your manufacturing company. These customer requests result in thousands of sales orders at your corporate headquarters that are routed to your manufacturing department for fulfillment. Once the orders are ready for shipping, a delivery request is processed in your operations department, and an invoice is sent from your accounts receivable department. Finally, when a check is received from the customer, the process is complete.
Proceeding from one step to another in handling of all these orders still involves passing print data from one department to another. But now, the data can be captured (often from very different computing platforms running many diverse applications) and sent instantly to other locations across the U.S. or even around the world.
Enterprise Output Management
The task of integrating this diversity of print data emerging from a variety of mainframe and client-server systems in the enterprise is known as enterprise output management (EOM).
The principal idea behind EOM is capturing print streams from diverse sources and delivering that data to a variety of output devices, including mainframe-attached and network-attached printers, fax-on-demand, Web pages and mobile computing devices. So what's the catch? Only that this whole process must be executed reliably, securely, and seamlesslyand that's no small undertaking for EOM providers.
The Barr Solution
As experts in print management and host connectivity, Barr Systems offers companies front-end solutions that accept data from a multitude of hosts, transform the data as needed, and distribute documents to reporting and output management software for further processing. Barr solutions make it possible to implement enterprise-wide output management on top of their network and print services infrastructure, leading to dramatic savings of time, money and effort over conventional printing, storage and distribution methods.
Importantly, Barr solutions allow companies to manage many different local and remote output devices from a single departmental server. Data can be routed to a wide range of printers, storage systems, and other devices. These capabilities are among the most desirable features for output management products, according to the research group IDC.
Regardless of an organization's size and existing infrastructure, Barr solutions can be tailored to meet its specific needs. Companies new to modern reporting and distribution systems, for example, will benefit from enhanced availability of online reports, improved security and optimal use of corporate Intranets. While corporations with existing electronic reporting or archiving systems can take advantage of enhanced online distribution options, including on-demand viewing, sorting, indexing and filtering of reports, document-level or page-level security, and other powerful and convenient services.
So, while the business process may never change, and the roles of customer and company may remain firmly fixed at opposite ends of the document delivery trail, the advances of technology in the next millennium are sure to turn that trail into an efficient, high-speed, distribution superhighway - to borrow an overworked, yet uniquely appropriate, expression.
For more information, send email to info@barrsystems.com.
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