November 30, 2011 – Boston, MA – Continuing a longstanding relationship, Compart today announced that Ricoh*, a leading provider of digital output solutions, is offering Compart DocBridge Mill transform software as one of the options available in its extensive workflow portfolio. This additional transform software enables customers to seamlessly work within each page of a document when they need to transform various text-based print streams.
 
“At Ricoh, we only partner with best-of-breed global companies, and our relationship with Compart typifies that philosophy,” said Bill Shaffer, Manager, Worldwide Software Alliances, Ricoh Production Print Solutions (RPPS).  “Compart is very highly regarded in the print software industry. Combining that with our established relationship made this extension a logical choice.”
 
Works with Many Types of Document Applications
Ricoh was looking for a new offering to integrate into its portfolio that would let customers address new data requirements within their existing workflow. Additionally, Ricoh wanted to add a consistent solution that would enable 100 percent identical output, unmatched accuracy and increased flexibility, not an easy technical feat.
 
After extensive testing of its color support, font and resource optimization, Ricoh decided to add DocBridge Mill transforms to its solutions portfolio. Most importantly, the Compart transforms provided full text output that enabled search and downstream manipulation. 
 
Responding to Output Market Needs
“Compart and Ricoh have a long relationship based on working together, and we have helped a significant number of joint customers. We are proud to be a part of this solution suite that will give Ricoh customers more control and flexibility for their data streams, so they can perform essential document management for their business applications,” said Compart Vice President of Sales, Mark Maragni.
 
Many Uses for Transform Software
Ricoh customers can use Compart DocBridge Mill transform software for a variety of requirements, including transforming legacy applications, new data formats, IMB changes and white space messaging.
 
Accommodating Legacy Applications
Large enterprises, service bureaus, communications firms, and others process high-volume print applications like statements and invoices. Often, the data streams come from line-of-business applications where it is inefficient or even impossible to make changes at the source. In some cases, the developers of legacy streams like Metacode are no longer employed in the company originating the data stream. With DocBridge Mill, companies can continue with viable legacy applications.
 
New Data Requirements
As different data formats emerge, customers end up with new requirements for their production workflow, such as generating color output or adding variable content for compliance. The result can be a challenging data stream. DocBridge Mill makes it easier to respond to changes without overhauling existing workflow.
 
Intelligent Mail Barcode
Intelligent mail barcode (IMB) is an example of how changing customer requirements create the need for a workflow tranform. Targeted to high volume mailers, IMB offers significantly enhanced capabilities over ZIP Code mailing. It provides more extensive tracking, and proper use of IMB helps high-volume mailers slash first class postage rates. Although eager to take advantage of the opportunity, mailers still have incoming print streams with ZIP Codes that need to be replaced with IMB. A transform can be text-based to pass text and data on a page, or it can be an image-based and transform the page as a single element, which doesn’t allow users to identify the specific zip Code data. For example, if the data stream is PDF, users want to transform the stream to afp within Pdf and identify every element on that page to locate the postal code data. Compart DocBridge Mill transform software makes it possible to identify the zip Code field and change the barcode. 
 
White Space Messaging
Another reason to use DocBridge Mill transform is to access the original document in text mode in order to add additional information. For some users, this will mean identifying available white space and adding messages in that space on the fly according to analytics-driven business rules.