Xerox Finland - Helsinki Transaction Processing Service Centre

The first of 4 Nordic TP Service Centres created by Rob Coate since 2012. Economies of scale were created by signing two outsourcing contracts simultaneously, one with a major insurance company, LähiTapiola, and the other with the global IT Services company, CGI.

With the combined volumes of the two contracts Rob was able to build an economic transformation programme and operating platform that would enable rapid reengineering of legacy print jobs into full-colour, transpromotional communications.

Twin Xerox CiPress production lines provide the inkjet capacity for the site. Three mainframe systems and a range of server-based applications deliver the legacy print jobs to the GMC Inspire Automation Production Management system, which manages the end to end flow of work through the site. GMC Inspire Designer / Formatter applications perform the AFPDS, PDF and PCL print stream processing and a range of in-built facilities, such as pre-printed stationery replacement, insert to onsert replacement and dynamic onsert additions, condition the output for efficient and economic, white paper inkjet printing.

Integral to the Production Management System is Ironsides Advanced Production Tracking (APT) system, which monitors the progress and integrity of work, against the job's SLA, through the production printers, automated inserting systems and manual packing stations. APT provides a single, seamless solution across the fleet of 7 printing devices and 4 Kern, Pitney Bowes and Buhrs inserting devices. APT also creates a full mail piece audit trail and performs the end of job reconcilliation process, automatically creating reprint requests to the Production Management System for all production spoils.

Xerox Sweden - Stockholm Transaction Processing Centre

In January 2016 Xerox acquired the transaction processing service operation from CGI in Sweden and a year long transition and transformation programme commenced.

In order to create the efficiencies required for reinvestment Rob Coate's vision was to transform the site into a high-productivity, lean, white paper factory. Fundemental to the transformation programme was the execution of a Xerox Lean Document Production (LDP) Assessment, which retrospectively traced the work movements of all jobs from two critical production months. Armed with this data, and with the proprietary Xerox LDP tools, the LDP Assessors were able to optimise the flow of work through the factory, advise on the equipment speed and capacity required to run the optimised factory, and even specified where the equipment should be located on the production floor to achieve the efficiencies.

Ultimately 3 new Xerox Impika inkjet production lines and 2 new Kern 3600 inserters were installed. A further 2 Kern 3500s were uprated with white paper factory modifications to match the capability of the 3600s.

Finally, a mandated upgrade was to replace an highly bespoke and out of service mail piece tracking system, the place of which was filled by Ironsides Technologies Advanced Production Tracking (APT). APT monitors the status of print jobs and print devices by interfacing directly with the Océ PRISMAproduction Server. Each sheet of paper and every envelope enclosed is tracked by APT through camera systems mounted on each inserting machine. 

Nationwide Building Society

Ensuring regulatory compliance was at the forefront of Nationwide's thoughts as 20% year-on-year growth streched their manual production processes to the full. A high-integrity, automated document factory solution was commissioned to improve productivity and to absorb the volume growth whilst assuring mail piece integrity and full traceability.

Sefas Open Print tools provided overall Production Management and print stream processing, CACI Anadata the tiered mail sortation, Pitney Bowes the mail piece integrity and Macro4 Columbus the CRM archive.

Northern Rock

Regulatory additions of Initial Disclosure Documents (IDD) and a multi-page Key Facts Illustrations (KFI) to each and every mortgage quotation was the business driver for Northern Rock to invest in a purpose-built automated document factory solution.

The strict deadlines set by the FSA meant that there was limited time to design, build and install a new business-critical system. Also, because KFIs contain detailed, highly personal financial information, security was a crucial concern.

Rob Coate led a six-strong project team and brought in technology partners Group1 and Macro4 to provide document composition and production management tools. The resulting Automated Document Factory took input from Northern Rock’s various document production systems and prepared pre-populated application forms for integration into customer information packs. Once all the necessary details had been collated, the packs are automatically despatched by fax, email or post, according to the customer’s preference.