Improve document effectiveness with personalized content and wider distribution, cut down on time and labor costs, improve sales revenues with complete automation of document production and delivery processes.

Enterprise Processing Engine

Documents are the primary "currency" of your business processes. Documents are used to transmit and exchange information with your customers, partners, suppliers or employees. Given the emerging pressures of regulatory compliance, content personalization, operational flexibility and global competition, existing rudimentary document generation tools will no longer be adequate. You require advanced solutions that keep up with the rapidly changing business environment.

The Business Challenge
Enterprises have spent a vast amount of time and money on implementing systems to automate transactions between themselves and their customers, partners, suppliers and employees. Yet most of them have not taken the necessary steps to ensure that their documents - which are their number one communication vehicle with the outside world - are being generated efficiently and effectively to corporate and regulatory requirements.

Although some traditional business systems are able to print documents, they are unable to address the growing challenges of personalization, corporate and legal compliance, ease-of-use, flexibility, and detail presentation. These systems have the following short-comings:

• Rigid and inflexible solutions that require costly and complex custom programming to meet the rapidly evolving and dynamic needs of the business
• Limited ability to generate documents that look the same everywhere, which prevents optimal distribution using a variety of means, such as, print, email or secure website.
• Inconsistent documents in content and form, do not adhere to corporate standards and comply with the latest regulations (what needs to go into the document, why each recipient received the document, etc.).
• Inadequate audit trail or history tracking capability, and limited ability to ensure use of the same versions of documents by associates, customers and partners.
• Partial language support , and incapable of addressing the needs and expectations of a growing international, multi-lingual customer base.

A Complete Solution
Tavant's Enterprise Document Engine is a scalable, flexible and cost-effective out-of-the-box solution that addresses all of the above challenges and more. It allows you to automatically generate and distribute documents - for all your enterprise applications - with the highest level of quality, consistency, compliance, effectiveness and efficiency.

Technology
EDE is built using proven, industry-standard, highly-scalable technologies, and is designed to be integrated into a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment.

EDE integrates, extends and augments Adobe® Central Pro Output Server and Adobe® Output Designer to deliver the following additional capabilities that businesses require:

• Document template management
• Data mapping and transformation capability
• Simplified integration with multiple business applications
• Repository of generated documents, enabling auditing, searching, reprinting and republishing
• Interactive testing environment and user interface for on-demand generation of one or more instances of documents.

Design, Testing, Rendering and Delivery:

• Easy to use web-based interface for defining, maintaining and applying document definitions, applications, data schemas, packaging rules, data validations and data filling rules.
• A WYSIWYG tool for designing document templates, and interface to allow end to end document generation testing.
• Ensures compliance using mandatory fields on documents and supporting review/approval workflow prior to generation.
• Just-in-time document generation, bulk/batch generation, packaging, printing, storage, emailing, and Internet-publishing capabilities.
• Universal document formats that look and print the same everywhere - PDF, PS and PCL.
• Complete multi-lingual support including Chinese and double-byte character sets.
• Storage, Retrieval and Management:
• Full search capabilities for data and documents.
• Maintains complete searchable activity logging and audit trail. Ability to reprint, re-email, republish.
• Template and document versioning, and rendering and distribution based on effective dating.
• Supports both document collaboration as well as document security across applications.

The Enterprise Document Engine has the following features:

• A complete document generation, versioning and archiving system that supports all business applications.
• Supports complex document requirements - multi-lingual, barcodes, custom page sizes, complex fonts, auto-justify, auto-expanding tables, watermarks, images, logos, and rotated text.
• Multiple applications can use their own data schemas to generate any document defined in Tavant EDE. Provides ESB interface (Web Service, JMS publish/subscribe) to business applications and an interactive web-based UI as well.
• Document design and generation is decoupled from legacy and packaged applications

Benefits

• EDE improves your sales revenues and operations costs:
• Improved document effectiveness by personalizing content and distributing content across a variety of mediums
• Dynamic document generation , anytime, anywhere
• Significantly condensed document-definition to document-delivery cycle time
• Greater compliance and higher document quality
• Reduced risk of human error and protection from unauthorized changes
• Reduced exposure to liability using compliant documents
• Reduced time and labor costs by automating document production and delivery processes.

Forms Processing Engine

Forms are used to exchange information across a whole range of your enterprise business processes. Capturing and processing information exchanged using forms stands at the crux of business process automation and integration. Given the increased business demands to accelerate the flow of information, boost the efficiency of data exchange and more tightly connect dispersed business process participants, your existing data capture approaches will no longer be adequate. Tavant's Forms Processing Engine enables you to easily create and deploy interactive PDF electronic forms, capture and process information from these forms, and seamlessly integrate that information into enterprise back-end systems and workflows. We reduce your operations costs and speed-up your responsiveness to customer demands and market changes.

The Business Challenge
Traditional paper forms are completely isolated from the business software systems that need to process the information contained in the forms. After two decades or computerization, even as businesses have automated most of their operations with multiple back-end systems (HR, ERP, SCM, CRM, etc.), paper-based forms are still not integrated into these systems. Information is manually transferred from forms and keyed into the back-end systems -- often multiple times and with lots of errors, resulting in highly inefficient workflows.

In some instances, businesses are now using standalone electronic documents as a proxy for paper forms. But these so-called electronic forms (e.g. MS Word or MS Excel docs) are still manually routed for action, and the information in these forms is still manually copy-pasted into back-end applications. The information contained in the forms is still isolated from the business systems that need to process the information.

Custom web-based applications are being deployed by many enterprises to replace paper. But, the forms in these applications cannot be cleanly inserted into existing document based workflows, are difficult to transition to for users, cannot be accessed offline, are often inaccessible outside the firewall, and require making larger investments in an always-on, complex, applications infrastructure.

The Tavant Forms Processing Engine (FPE) has the following stages:

• Create and Distribute: These steps involve creating forms, defining the notification and data-handling rules, and distributing these intelligent forms in whatever manner you want (email, website).
• Capture: In the capture stage, the form data is received by online/offline submission or email. FPE then processes and stores the submitted data based on the configured parameters for XML schema, file types and formats.
• Process and Integrate: Based on pre-defined notification and distribution rules, the submitted data is captured and routed for action within your company. The information is also aggregated for reporting and integration with back-end business applications.

Benefits
Tavant's Form Processing Engine allows you to do the following:

• Generate and publish a variety of electronic forms
• Distribute forms from within the system
• Monitor submissions and resubmissions of forms
• Specify routing and processing rules for submitted data
• Review and update status of submissions
• Maintain history of all submitted data, including attachments
• Integrate XML-tagged data to external systems

Streamlining Your Business Processes

FPE can be used to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of a wide variety of business processes across your company:

• Marketing and Sales (action-enabled marketing collateral, order and renewal forms, interactive catalogs)
• Customer Service (surveys, field work orders, customer information updates, parts or service requests)
• Operations (maintenance check lists, work orders, compliance reporting data collection, IT provisioning)
• Supply Chain (purchase requests, order responses, partner or supplier information updates)
• Administration and Finance (personnel change forms, timesheets, expense reports, forecast roll-ups, IT support)

Compelling Benefits
FPE accelerates your sales revenues and reduces your operations costs:

• Streamline data capture processes - Forms Solutions serve as central data capture gateways, updating databases with structured XML
• Easy migration from paper based forms to an automated data capture method
• Portable mechanism for information capture , because forms are easy to distribute, and data can be easily input and ransferred
• Allow end users to work online or offline using widely installed standard form fillers (Adobe Acrobat Reader)
• Enable document-based workflow where all submitters, reviewers and users interact only with the form document
• Automate outside-the-firewall interactions

Technology and Expertise

FPE is built using proven, industry-standard, highly-scalable technologies, and is designed to be integrated into a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment.

FPE integrates and extends Adobe® LiveCycle Designer , Adobe® LiveCycle Forms, and Adobe® LiveCycle Reader Extensions to deliver comprehensive solutions.

Tavant's experience and expertise in Financial Services, Manufacturing and Channel Management allows Tavant to deliver solutions that are tailored to the unique needs of businesses in these markets.