Introduction
In 1982, IC Group had its humble beginnings by providing local financial institutions with marketing and secure check printing services. Fast forward more than three decades later, IC Group, based in Salt Lake City, has grown into a successful provider of digital and commercial print and marketing technology solutions that support customer interactions across multiple channels. By constantly striving for excellence, embracing their value
proposition of “PEOPLE, TECHNOLOGY, SOLUTIONS” and employing a “whatever it takes” approach, IC Group ensures that it consistently exceeds customer expectations and implements new technology to meet challenges head-on. When IC Group was awarded the transactional print and mail business for a new client in the healthcare industry, meeting the challenge of onboarding their client’s work was par for the course.
Service providers understand the challenges associated with onboarding new clients; however, this new client brought additional challenges to IC Group, including a new approach to network security, software and several new applications. Along with these challenges, an imposed deadline for project completion was mandated by the client’s former service provider, thereby putting pressure on IC Group to complete the transition in a very short timeframe. Once the client was fully on boarded, IC Group’s overall mail volume would increase by a whopping 51%. To manage this work, a new workflow, monitoring process and enterprise production system were necessary to meet the mail volume, security requirements, and stringent SLAs specific to the healthcare industry.
Existing Technology Environment – Mixture of Internally Developed and Purchased
Organizations that have grown through acquisition often end up with a technology environment consisting of a menagerie of components that are not well integrated. The existing technology environment at IC Group as described by Jared Mascarenaz, VP of Technology Solutions, consists of several different technology platforms, some that were internally developed for the secure check printing business and others such as a web to print portal used by marketing clients. Other components include purchased software such as Inspire and Planet Press for variable data document composition, MarCom Central for web to print production, BCC Software for postal management and an integrated enterprise level MIS system to manage commercial print.
To onboard their new client, IC Group needed to purchase the Alchem-e™ platform from Racami, Quadient® Inspire for document composition, new printers and more. This large and complicated effort made it necessary for IC Group to partner with Racami to develop the Alchem-e™ online workflows and assist with software configuration. By doing so, this allowed resources within IC Group to focus on efforts to scope, design and acquire a new secure network, additional production equipment and develop a support model for this new business. In addition, an understanding of the document archive, business rules for processing the print jobs and the automated document factory software used by the client’s former service bureau were also necessary to ensure all critical details were covered for the transition.
Racami – More Than a Technology Company
As a skilled integrator focused on the print and mail industry, Racami played a major role in the successful onboarding of IC Group’s new client and helped them finish the transition by the commitment date. Engaging Racami for staff augmentation allowed IC Group to focus on building out
the new IT infrastructure, while Racami completed the other critical tasks necessary to onboard the client, such as:
- Installing and configuring Racami’s Alchem-e™ platform to automate the digital workflow and feed data into the dashboard
- Migrating all print jobs off the Quadient Inspire platform at the former service bureau to IC Group’s newly installed Inspire platform, and
- Converting the former service bureau’s document archive to the Alchem-e™ archive
- Integrating with IC Group’s existing MIS system
With the help of Racami, IC Group successfully completed the transition in four months and met the client’s requirements for visibility into the operational process through the Alchem-e™ dashboard―all while buying time to hire resources to manage the new suite of software tools. Racami is now assisting with the addition of advanced inserter integrity systems for tracking individual mail pieces and automating the reprint process where Alchem-e™ creates the inserter control files and monitors the damages, diverts and other exceptions.
Alchem-e™ – A Unique Approach to Platform Integration
Alchem-e™ is an integration platform that contains a dashboard and workflow engine which creates a single master system that serves as the primary command center and allows more control and visibility into daily print operations. For organizations that utilize multiple systems and tools to manage transactional print and mail, Alchem-e™ is the “glue” that brings it all together to allow for better tracking and management.
“A common challenge we hear from our clients and prospects today is that they need visibility, security and control of their client communications with speed to market and 100% accuracy. This all needs to be achieved while allowing what we, as print manufactures, do well, which is to produce these programs in the most efficient
manner for our production teams by utilizing a standardized workflow within in a single tool. Alchem-e™ does exactly that. There is a ton of functionality native to Alchem-e™.”— Jared Mascarenaz, VP, Technology Solutions IC Group
Alchem-e™ also enables faster onboarding for new customers and jobs and provides intelligent automation based on the concepts of: customer, product, bill of material (inventory) and workflow. The browser-based dashboard provides full visibility into the operation including job characteristics and status, equipment utilization and efficiency, facility information for multi-site operations, customer and product information and inventory. The dashboard is also roles-based so that access can be provided to both operational staff as well as business users.
The Alchem-e™ FLOW workflow engine contains a designer that allows a business user to easily onboard a new customer or job and create the processing workflow through simple drag and drop functionality. Workflows can hook together multiple processes including an external process such a composition tool or postal management software. Once the external process has completed, data is collected to update the dashboard and the workflow continues on to the next step. This low-code environment makes it easier for business users to quickly create automated workflows, yet is complex enough to allow developers to add new functions to the workflow system. Alchem-e™ FLOW is extendable, empowering developers to build their own reusable steps that become part of the workflow system.
“Alchem-e™ FLOW is different from other workflow engines that simply move files and fire off processes. The concept of customers, products, bill of material and workflow takes this to the business users who need to know more than just what file was processed. Combine this business intelligence with the ability for our customers’ IT staffs to create and add new reusable steps gives them advantages they can’t get from traditional automation systems.”
— Matt Mahoney, EVP, Sales Racami LLC
Trio of Success: IC Group, Racami and Alchem-e™
IC Group’s success over the last three decades has come from its commitment to exceed client expectations. By acquiring the
Alchem-e™ platform and partnering with Racami for the onboarding process, IC Group has another success story to tell. The current in-house solutions at IC Group―whether internally developed or purchased― could not provide the monitoring capabilities and full visibility into daily production as required by the client.
“Based on the requirements for this customer, their volumes and tight SLAs, none of our in-house systems had everything that Alchem-e™ has in one package.”
— Jared Mascarenaz, VP, Technology Solutions IC Group
Through automation, the Alchem-e™ workflow engine triggers different processes―all without human intervention.
Efficiency comes from automation and now that the client has been on boarded, IC Group can boast the following statistics:
- 51% growth in mail volume
- A 45% increase in job level transactions being managed by 5% headcount
- 98.5% of production print jobs either on time or early
Upon completion of the transition, IC Group switched gears to focus on training internal resources on the Alchem-e™ platform and gearing up to onboard another segment of healthcare work which was awarded during the initial implementation. This next phase
includes several complex applications which total over 94,000 print jobs―three times more than what IC Group is doing today, and they know this volume could not be managed without a platform like Alchem-e™.
“Alchem-e™ will allow us to scale quickly and give us the ability to manage this high volume of additional work.”
— Jared Mascarenez, VP, Technology Solutions IC Group
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