HOV Services Gains Flexibility with Crawford Technology

Difficult to work with print-ready files had become a roadblock to winning new business for this print/mail outsource provider. But now, with the use of Crawford Technologies' software solutions, HOV Services can accept any print-ready files while gaining the ability to optimize the production workflow. Best of all, the new solution allows outsource clients to 'touch and feel' their documents in a virtual archive system. The result? New customers and new business thanks to the expanded capabilities from CrawfordTech.

HOV Services is a global outsource provider with high volume print/mail production centers located in Troy, MI and Southlake, TX. HOV customers include FORTUNE 100 companies across nearly every market and the company boasts state-of-the art production capabilities.

But according to Kevin McRae, IT Director for HOV Services, the constraints of working with print-ready files had become a barrier to winning new business. As a result, the company set out to gain more flexibility.

"We were working with one customer who is a well known national healthcare provider, and they have 14 different legacy systems that create a variety of documents using all kinds of different composition tools," explained McRae.

"For us to ask them to give us the raw data, so that we could create print-ready files to our standards was unrealistic. More and more customers are simply not interested in digging into the legacy code. We needed a way to accommodate them."

In addition to the technical constraints of working with print-ready files, McRae pointed to the need to accommodate the kind of 'high touch' workflow that customers are often used to. "With this customer especially, there were a lot of programming problems that caused a number of errors and quirks over time," said McRae.

"As a result, they were manually pulling and processing problem documents. We needed to give them an electronic viewing tool so they could still look at and control their print files while we assumed the production part of the process."

HOV Services accommodates customer requirements and optimizes production. To accommodate the growing market demand, HOV Services began to search for a solution that would not only give them the capability to accept and print legacy files, but also the ability to optimize the efficiency of the final production process with the same kind of advanced capabilities they were used to when working with raw data and from scratch document composition output.

After a comprehensive evaluation, HOV Services chose a number of solutions from Crawford Technologies, including the PRO AFP, PRO PS, PRO PCL, PRO META, PRO PDF and PRO Concatenator products.

According to McRae, Crawford Technologies was the only provider able to meet all of their requirements. "We did an extensive proof of concept using CrawfordTech as well as a number of other vendors' products and we found that CrawfordTech best suited our needs."

Greg Carey, Technical Support Specialist, explains the capabilities of their new CrawfordTech products. "We can accept print-ready formats in PCL, LCDS/Metacode, AFP, PDF or whatever it is—and still do any enhancements that are required from that point on," said Carey. "And these customers often want to retain a semblance of control over their final output. Now with CrawfordTech, we can take any print stream, run it up to our archiving system for online viewing where our customers can review or electronically pull documents. Then once released for production, we print those documents on whatever machine we want."

CrawfordTech software helps win new business and expand service capabilities; more than that we work with HOV Services to provide the right solution for their business challenges.