UPC Austria

Smart Document Flow at UPC Austria

The Project

After its takeover of Inode and merger with the company, UPC Austria, a multimedia provider, reorganized its document-related processes. The solution created with the aid of Infinica, a Vienna-based software firm, received the ECM Award 2010 in the category “Economic Efficiency”. Using Infinica’s solution, several hundred different types of documents are now being generated with complex rules. The company generates several thousand documents daily. The most important types of these documents include purchase orders, offers, informational letters, job orders and contracts.

Manfred Steinbichl, the head of IT at UPC, wanted to create a flexible, easily scalable solution for composing and outputting business documents.

Challenges

Manfred Steinbichl, head of IT at UPC Austria: “The special challenge to us was to map acquisition in the processes and in document generation within a very short period of time.”

Documents had previously been composed transactionally via data from backend systems that had in fact been optimized for dynamic collection, processing and archiving of data, but which showed limitations in functions for business documents. For this reason, the IT team had to develop the desired formatting logic and output rules to handle this point. Triggering the various output channels posed a challenge. This frequently had to be programmed individually.

Results Achieved

Michael Kristek, IT Deployment Manager at UPC Austria and project manager: “A modern and flexible system is now responsible for document composition and output management. This makes it much easier to carry out adjustments to changing processes and to perform administration of underlying IT components. Introducing the Infinica solution has made the entire process much more transparent.”

  • High efficiency in the structuring of document templates (the time required for the template creation was reduced on average from two days to one). Template modules can be reused with no problems.
  • The response to changes in corporate design was simplified substantially (by a much shorter implementation period and significantly less testing involved).
  • A much higher proportion of information sent via e-mail with document attachments enables not only providing sustainable economic basis (green IT) but also massive cost savings.
  • About 25% more documents are sent by e-mail than previously. At a daily volume of 2,600 documents, this results in clear cost savings for printing, paper and delivery.
  • More rapid delivery of invoices. UPC used to require an average of four days from the date of creation to receipt by the customer. Today, documents are delivered to customers in serviceoriented fashion via e-mail within a few minutes.