* The five components of StreamServe’s Business Communication Platform
When I opened my monthly bill from Chrysler Credit Corporation recently, I noticed a change in the look of the document. My first glance told me it was more stylish, with nice muted colors and enticing pictures of new cars. A deeper look told me there was more personal information aimed specifically at me, showing an intimate knowledge of my buying habits and my loan pattern.
I now know the power behind that lovely new invoice is StreamServe. Although StreamServe has been around for nine years, you probably haven’t heard about the company before. Until recently, the company was headquartered in Europe, with most of its business there as well. This is changing now that Chris Stone, formerly vice chairman in the office of the CEO at Novell, has assumed the CEO role at StreamServe and established headquarters in the U.S. The company is on the verge of a big push into the North American market.
StreamServe delivers “enterprise document presentment” technology. Stone calls it the “last mile” of serving documents to customers.
In a typical enterprise, data is stored in various sources and formats and generated by numerous applications. For example, you might have data coming from your ERP application, or your CRM application. It could be stored in a relational database or in a document management system. On the output side, you might need to use this data to generate purchase orders, invoices, requests for quotes, contracts, labels, pick tickets or other types of documents. And, you might need to send these documents to printers, fax machines, e-mail, text messages, or Web portals, and possibly in multiple languages.
Faced with these challenges, many companies have large staffs of programmers who generate custom code to pull and integrate the data from various enterprise applications, generate the documents, and distribute them to customers, partners, employees and other consumers of the information. A minor change in a desired output could require hours of programming.
StreamServe’s Enterprise Document Presentment (EDP) platform is designed to tackle the inherent problems of assembling meaningful data from multiple sources and presenting it to a specific customer segment in an appropriate context. The StreamServe application is good at parsing inbound data streams such as that from tables or XML, and then rendering and distributing the data as needed.
The EDP platform consists of five components that bridge your core business systems and your communication channels. They are:
1. Application connectivity – Accept input in many formats from multiple channels, including many legacy systems and most enterprise applications such as ERP, CRM, HR, etc.
2. Document composition – Utilize easy-to-use design tools that enable you to create templates and apply business rules to documents generated by your enterprise applications. Communicate with a mass audience on a personal level with custom messages and individually tailored communications that reflect a specific customer’s situation.
3. Document interaction – Interact with the business documents generated by your enterprise applications using simple, intuitive electronic forms. Data captured by StreamServe can be validated and mapped as input to business documents. You can review and update existing application data through a zero-footprint Web browser – without making any changes to underlying applications.
4. Personalization – Convert languages and currencies; incorporate personalized marketing messages tailored to the customer’s specific situation.
5. Multi-channel distribution and storage – Efficiently manage high-volume printing and distributed output and increase flexibility by distributing documents through fax, e-mail, HTML, XML, SMS, and more. When finished, securely store your business documents.
Here’s a quick example of how KLM Royal Dutch Airlines is making use of StreamServe’s technology. The airline wanted to implement an electronic ticketing system. As an international carrier, the ticket receipts needed to be delivered to customers in different address formats and languages as determined by each customer.
When a person books and pays for a KLM flight, a reservation is made in the central reservation system, Corda. The customer selects how to receive the ticket receipt (e-mail, mail or fax) and chooses one of six languages. When the e-ticket is issued, Corda sends XML data to the StreamServe application, which places the data in the correct template and delivers the formatted receipt document to a mail or fax server.
The ticket itself never needs to be printed, as the database entry proves that the customer purchased a seat. Unlike a paper ticket, the e-ticket can never be lost, and the savings from not printing and mailing tickets is enormous. What’s more, the fact that StreamServe can utilize data from the reservations database and format it in a user-definable way is invaluable.
StreamServe is targeting several industries as it pushes further into Europe and into North America. The company has solutions and consulting services aimed at utilities, distribution and retail, financial services, manufacturing, telecom, insurance and post and print. Start watching your utility bills and cell phone statements to see if they are jazzed up and highly personalized for you. If they are, chances are that StreamServe is working in the background.
