InfoPrint Turns In-plant Around

Like many insurance companies, 21st Century Insurance Group relies on printed communications to keep in touch with customers. In recent years, however, the Woodland Hills, Calif.-based company’s in-plant had not grown as quickly as its customer base. So the company turned to InfoPrint Solutions Co. (IPS), the new joint venture between IBM and Ricoh. IPS helped the company move from a traditional 1980s mainframe-driven operation to an automated document factory.

“The InfoPrint solution enabled us to replace a number of existing systems, improve operational efficiency and increase our printing speeds,” remarks Jim Chalker, director of IT at 21st Century Insurance Group. “Better yet, the solution can adapt and grow to meet our future needs.”

The end-to-end document workflow management solution has significantly improved printed customer communications integrity by tracking each mail piece through the print/mail process and providing the automated reprint of documents lost or damaged during inserting.

In March, cut-sheet printers were replaced with the InfoPrint 4100 Advanced Function Printing System; outdated inserters were upgraded to new file-based Kern Multimailer 2500 inserters. As a result, print run times were reduced by 75 percent. The InfoPrint Workflow converts print data from proprietary Xerox Metacode format to AFP, adds 2-d barcodes to pages and generates the inserter control files for Kern inserters, all without any modifications to existing mainframe print-generation programs.