What would you do if you had to convert millions of documents to PDF daily?

Automate, Convert and Manage

Consider this – An enterprise customer in the insurance industry needed to create a thumbnail of all of their customer documents on a daily basis. The number of such documents to be thumbnailed exceeded 10 million per day. Similarly, another large enterprise customer in the utilities space needed to convert more than 2.5 million documents per day with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to ensure that the images become fully searchable.
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What do you think these customers did?

 
1. Used a team of dedicated resources to manually convert each document
 
2. Developed an in-house or proprietary IT solution
 
3. Purchased a document-to- PDF conversion solution

If the customer chose #1 then the odds are high that they incurred high operational costs along with the risk of human error, all of which could have led to legal implications or delays in their go-to-market strategy.

Selecting #2 would work as long as the development project did not reduce or interfere with other IT tools and infrastructure. E.g. if an in-house system does not integrate with let’s say an ECM (Enterprise Content Management) or ERP system, then inevitably the scenario becomes much like option #1. In addition, internal teams now own the training, maintenance, upgrades and integration of these systems with the other IT infrastructure and related costs.

Well, both customers opted for Option #3—purchasing a document-to-PDF conversion solution. The benefit of this option for these customers was that this let them focus on their core competencies while allowing the appropriate experts to provide them with the best conversion solution around.

This also got them off the hook for training, maintenance, upgrades and integration of these systems with other IT infrastructure.

If you need to automate the conversion of large volumes of documents into PDF, here are some of the top few things you should look into before making your selection:

 
• How many documents can be converted to PDF in an hour or per day (Volume of documents converted)
 
• What is the rendition quality (fidelity & accuracy)
 
• How scalable is the solution? Will it be able to satisfy  or align with your organization’s continued expansion and growth (enterprise-grade or not)
 
• What and how many different file formats can be converted to PDF with the solution
 
• Type and level of support available for output formats such as PDF/a, PDF/x etc.
 
• Extent of automation -- can the technology automatically merge and assemble multiple documents of the same format or even different formats into one single output document
 
• Can the technology automate inclusion of additional features like headers, footers, watermarks or hyperlinks
 
• Does it support conversion of images into searchable content (using OCR technology)
 
• Does it provide management of document-to-PDF jobs (Monitoring & Reporting)
 
• Existing customers/references of the technology provider
 
• SLA’s offered and support infrastructure