Integritie help RR Donnelley create a World Class Content Management System

We’re all familiar with the pain involved in hunting through piles of bank statements and phone bills, searching for a particular transaction. Multiply that task by several million, and you have some idea of the difficulties many businesses face in storing and retrieving vital customer data. But for RR Donnelley Global Document Solutions (www.rrdgds.com), a company delivering critical business services to some of the UK’s largest organisations, this challenge has proved to be a significant business opportunity RR Donnelley began by offering print and mail services to high street banks, mobile phone companies and other suppliers who need to send out statements and other paperwork to customers on a regular basis. Many such companies want to focus on core activities, and to outsource responsibility for managing customer documents to specialist operators.

RR Donnelley is able to exploit state-of-the art imaging and printing technology to handle these operations as cost-effectively and efficiently as possible, with the result that some four years after it first started offering its services, the company now has over five billion documents stored online for clients. Many of those clients are financial services companies.

They, along with other organisations, are now facing additional legislative and compliance requirements, which mean they must be able to locate any given piece of information at any time. They must also ensure that certain categories of information are destroyed after a specified period, usually seven years.

RR Donnelley’s response to this has been to introduce a content management system, which allows its customers to search through millions of online documents to locate the precise piece of information needed within seconds. It did so in collaboration with Integritie, an IBM premier business partner, with customers in 24 countries. Integritie is a global content management specialist in imaging, document management, telephone call recording, email archive and storage offerings. (www.integritie.com).

“RR Donnelley want speed to market with their offerings, and we offer the skills and solutions the company needs to do so,” explains Integritie’s managing director Michael Veenswyk. Integritie proposed a solution based around IBM technology including IBM’s DB2 Content Management suite of applications its DR550 storage solution, pSeries servers, plus Integritie’s own Knowledge Capture software. The result is RR Donnelley have created one of the world’s leading technology content management systems. “The solution was based on tried and trusted technology. Many of our clients are risk-aware and so wanted to be sure that our content management system would have solid foundations and be well supported. It also needed to be scaleable and resilient,” reports Chris Airey, solutions & IT director at RR Donnelley. “With around 1,300 IT people working for us globally, we do have in-house expertise. But our focus is on delivery to our customers – we don’t want to become the world’s experts in content management nuances. We want to bring in that kind of knowledge when we need it and focus on our job of providing highly credible service,” Airey adds.

Smooth sailing The IBM content management system that Integritie helped design and deliver allows RR Donnelley to create a central client file which holds all the information a company has on a particular individual. This includes any digital record in any format – from Word document to Excel spreadsheet, mainframe file, video, telephone call, email, image, reports or statements. This file can be searched in a number of ways, including by client name or part of the name, account number, date or bank sort code.

As a result, search times have been slashed. One credit card company, for instance, used to store cheque payment details on microfiche. To find a specific payment could take up to five days and involve several processes. The same information can now be located online within seconds, which resulted in the company saving over £3m annually on microfiche and administration costs.

A particular strength of the system, according to Airey, is that this single repository of client contacts combines both outbound documents (such as monthly statements) and inbound documents (such as customer correspondence or signed contracts) in order to improve customer service.

“Quite often organisations approach document archiving in line with their existing business processes, so items are filed as either inbound or outbound, making it harder to see a total picture of how that company has dealt with a particular customer,” Airey explains.

In contrast, RR Donnelley’s approach means call centre staff can build an immediate rapport with customers who phone up, since they do not need to consult several different systems to track responses to a letter. The system stores documents in the same size and format as the original, making it easier for staff and customers to pick out specific items to discuss.

RR Donnelley now handles two million retrievals a month on behalf of their customers. With so much sensitive information held by a third party, RR Donnelley’s clients want to be sure that their particular customer details are kept safe and secure. This is another area where Integritie and RR Donnelley worked together to exploit the potential of technology: the software and servers can be divided up into distinct “customer domains”, which are allocated to specific clients and cannot be accessed by anyone else.

“The service RR Donnelley provides is like a hotel. Each customer checks in and registers and is given their own, dedicated secure room – in other words, each customer can only ever be in touch with their own data,”

Veenswyk says. In addition, the content management application is run as a mirrored system, so that everything is replicated 100 per cent, with a copy held at RR Donnelley’s head offices and a second copy held on tape at a site 15 miles away. Normally, both systems are in operation, but if one suffers problems, everything is transferred to the alternative, which then operates as a disaster recovery site.

Such an approach ensures data is protected, according to compliance requirements, while workflow facilities within the system provide prompts for actions such as destroying information that should no longer be kept as it is outside the time limit required. As well as these benefits, the system offers reduced storage and retrieval costs, and better customer service.

“When it comes to meeting compliance requirements, a lot of companies have gone for a sticking plaster approach, which basically just covers the problem. RR Donnelley and Integritie worked together to develop a solution that offers proven added value – in reality, a true enabler of rounded customer service,” Airey concludes.