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Whitehill Transform Suite

Tell us about your company’s history in the output industry.

Based in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, Whitehill is a privately owned company founded in 1997.   Whitehill serves over 600 customers in 45 countries, focusing on the legal, financial services and insurance markets. Whitehill’s customers include companies such as CIBC, Allmerica, U.S. Financial Life and Navigant Consulting Inc., as well as more than half of the world’s largest legal firms, including Baker McKenzie and Clifford Chance.

“We’ve taken clients who had to print and manually sort documents, or having to re-key legacy data into different database systems, and given them one, coherent system that automatically does everything they need to do with any data,” says Paul McSpurren, President & CEO of Whitehill Technologies, Inc. “Most importantly, we implement our solution in days not months, and our customers typically see a full return on their investment by the next quarter.”

Tell us about the product(s) and its key features.

Whitehill’s format transformation software is Whitehill Transform Suite, which provides companies with a quick, cost-effective option for transferring outdated, legacy print formats into more effective data types. This suite of print-stream transformation and manipulation software provides conversion of print streams including Xerox Metacode, LCDS, AFP, MO:DCA-P, PCL, PostScript, PDF, Flat File, Line Print, ASCII, EBCDIC, XML and HTML into other formats including PDF, PostScript, AFP, TIFF, PCL, XML, Xerox normalized metacode and CSV files.

Whitehill Transform Suite offers a variety of additional features that enable more effective data management, including print file splitting, document reengineering, document enhancement, data mining, text extraction, print file process management and automation.

The document indexing feature selects and extracts pertinent metadata from the print-stream, allowing valuable information to be indexed, such as the sender, receiver, follow-up status, key fields such as monetary value of an invoice, and more. This indexed data is stored and is fully searchable.

What brought about the need for this product?  Why was this product created?

All printers share one characteristic: they are mechanical devices that deposit ink or toner on paper in a very specific way. They must be told exactly where to place the ink or toner for the resulting text or image to appear correctly. A computer sends these instructions to a printer in the form of a "Print Description Language" (PDL). There are several PDLs, and not every printer understands every PDL.

Each of the major printer manufacturers has developed their own PDLs. Xerox created Metacode and LCDS (Line Conditioned Data Stream). IBM has AFP (Advanced Function Presentation) and MO:DCA-P (Mixed Object Document Content Architecture for Presentation). Hewlett-Packard uses PCL (Printer Control Language). In addition, software producer Adobe Systems has attempted to create a standard PDL called PostScript.

What value does this product bring to the industry?

“Not only can Whitehill Transform Suite provide our customers with exceptional ROI by putting their business information to better use, but the software allows them to maintain true fidelity amongst fonts, images, logos and forms, adding flare to communications that would often be overlooked,” says McSpurren. “By taking data into a single, accessible environment, companies can also more easily report for compliance purposes.”

By leveraging investments already made in legacy print systems like Xerox and IBM, Whitehill clients have achieved significant benefits in remarkable timeframes without the need for any complex changes to existing applications and systems. Creating documents, integrating data and managing content are just some of the ways clients make better use of their application output with solutions from Whitehill Technologies, Inc.

What niche of the market does this product fit?

With Whitehill Transform Suite, insurance and banking companies have a quick, cost-effective option for transferring outdated, legacy print formats into more effective data types. This suite of print-stream transformation and manipulation software provides conversion of print streams including Xerox Metacode, LCDS, AFP, MO:DCA-P, PCL, PostScript, PDF, Flat File, Line Print, ASCII, EBCDIC, XML and HTML into other formats including PDF, PostScript, AFP, PCL, XML, Xerox normalized metacode and CSV files.

“We’re giving banking and insurance companies one place to go to solve all their document composition and format transformation challenges – whether they require a full-service tool like Whitehill <xml>Transport, or need an immediate print transformation tool with Whitehill Transform Suite,” said McSpurren.

How does this product fit into the HVTO Industry?

Print file splitting permits bursting of large print documents into smaller, more accessible sections. This allows companies to print out only the precise information they are looking for.

The software also allows output streams to be sent to multiple destinations during one processing pass, presenting significant time savings. Copies of a statement can be sent to a variety of parties simultaneously instead of having to trigger multiple separate send-outs.

What are the benefits of this product?

Whitehill Transform Suite enables cost-effective, transparent conversion of legacy print formats.

Most large organizations have critical business information locked in legacy print formats. What was once an optimum print format for outputting business documents such as bills, invoices and reports, becomes outdated, and often prohibits valuable data from being extracted, combined with other information, and distributed effectively. Increasingly, customers, partners and internal audiences are also requiring paper-based information to be available in electronic format and via the Web.

The impact on a company’s bottom line is tremendous. Business processes are inefficient because the right information cannot be properly obtained, and extra staff time is required to extract and merge different data sources. For example, some legacy print formats do not allow companies to access a desired two or three pages of a 1,000-page document. The company is required to print out the entire document to access the relevant content. Using IT resources to upgrade legacy systems is also proving costly for many organizations.

Whitehill Transform Suite solves these challenges quickly and cost-effectively by transferring outdated, legacy print formats into more effective data types. The software allows companies to use data trapped in heterogeneous systems, bringing the data into a single, accessible environment and a single storage area.

Tell us about the greatest successes of your company and/or product.

“Whitehill has grown rapidly because we’ve developed a quick, cost-effective and unobtrusive way to deal with a very big and costly problem for companies – trying to unlock relevant information from structured and unstructured business data and making valuable use of it,” says McSpurren.

Whitehill has teamed up with a variety of other industry-leading partners, including vertically focused companies such as Thomson Elite, SOLCORP and Allenbrook; document management systems and enterprise content management vendors such as Hummingbird Ltd., Interwoven Inc. and WORLDOX; and vertical system integrators and resellers such as Computer Associates, IBM, Axxia Systems, Tikit, Software Information Systems (SIS) and Document Dialog.

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