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PIREL Event held at CGI
PIREL's Answer to the Paperless Office Challenge
The "paperless office" is a promise that will probably never see the day. Since the promise was made more than 20 years ago, paper clutter has expanded exponentially on the average desk. And the need for paper documents will certainly not disappear soon.
A much more reasonable view is the "paper-as-you-need" approach, in which all company documents are permanently stored in electronic form and find their way on paper only when specifically needed. Such is the approach PIREL proposes with its PIREL EFS Server technology, and which it is implementing successfully in countless major companies in North America.
One could view PIREL's solution as bringing the capability of the Internet to companies for managing their own masses of electronic documents. Employees regularly consult external information bases on the Internet to retrieve specific information items which they then choose to save on their PC or print on paper. Surprisingly, few companies are equipped to allow the same process in-house.
That process becomes possible with the PIREL EFS Server. This module links to any computer database or legacy IT system to retrieve existing data that would have previously been extracted and printed. The server also allows the capture of any new data fed to it as document images or electronic forms. Based on this data, countless operations now become possible: data is indexed to allow new search capabilities, old document formats are automatically set and stored for interrogation and retrieval, new document formats can be designed, workflow patterns can be implemented to ensure that a document follows the right control and verification procedures.
Most of all, reports remain in a compact electronic form until end users need to interrogate them from their usual web browser and download them. These searches can be extremely simple or complex, using multiple criteria or boolean operators, to post results on-screen. From the results posted in his web browser, an end user can choose to view and retrieve only one document, or many, in the universal PDF format.
Trans Canada Retail Services (TCRS), which manages complete private label credit card programs for some of Canada's largest retailers, has achieved considerable savings thanks to the PIREL EFS solution. More than that, "we've been able to meet and exceed our business goals thanks to our partnership with PIREL", says Carl Rampaul, director of systems operations for Trans Canada Credit Corporation (TCC), which owns TCRS. TCC is an affiliate of Wells Fargo Financial, itself owned by Wells Fargo and Company, a $370 billion diversified financial services company.
TCRS used to print every year 20 million pages of reports in its 170 branches across Canada and wanted to streamline its operations, at the same time doing away with its massive paper consumption. The project presented significant challenges. The solution had to connect to the existing IT environment, present a web based interface, adapt to the existing data stream, and individual pages could not exceed 2 kilobytes.
PIREL was up to the challenge and archived hundreds of thousands of pages of reports with its EFS Solution. All reports became available online at all branches in a very "lite" format that presented files of only 1,2 kilobytes. A key element of the solution lay in the Universal connector that allowed PIREL's system instant access to all data in the client's IT environment. Implementing the whole project required only a few months. In fact, reports Carl Rampaul, "the biggest chunk of the time in the project was required by PIREL to determine our needs before implementing the solution".
Benefits to TCRS were substantial. "Users can now print only a few pages in a report where, before, they would see a whole report land on their desk", observes the systems specialist. "This generated significant savings on paper and distribution costs. The information was accessible to an unlimited number of users with no additional cost". An added advantage was that TCRS management could now send marketing and promotional material to all its employees in real time, to fit changing market opportunities.
And PIREL's solution was very price competitive. "A well known competitor proposed a solution for about $700,000, but the cost with PIREL was much cheaper", states Rampaul.
Merrill Lynch, the brokerage powerhouse in New York, also implemented a PIREL system in several US branches. Here again, the PIREL EFS Server streamlined this process by linking to Merrill's legacy systems.