Founded in 1922, United Services Automobile Association is a worldwide insurance and financial services association with over 3 million customers. Headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, it also has regional offices in California, Colorado, Florida and Virginia as well as international offices in England and Germany.

USAA has traditionally conducted most of its business by telephone and mail. This has proven to be an efficient and cost-effective method of marketing its financial and insurance products.

USAA is the nation's largest mail order company in terms of sales volume and is the second largest internationally.

USAA maintains two completely separate printing areas. The first, "Output Services", is involved with mainframe printing while the second, "Central Duplicating" is involved with reproduction and general publishing.

Output Services produces mainframe applications employing a combination of AFP and LCDS data-streams. Their current equipment includes multiple Xerox IPS printers attached directly to the IBM Mainframe. A 4890 NPS/IPS switchable printer is also connected to the mainframe for highlight colour applications.

Central Duplicating operates a wide variety of machinery including a DocuTech 135 and now a new DocuTech 6180 as well as an assortment of finishing equipment. Central Duplicating generally produced static documents in high volumes such as booklets, brochures and letters. In cases where variable data was involved the required portion would be printed in the Output Services area and manually inserted in the Central Duplicating area.

This disjointed process resulted in extra costs, manual intervention in the insertion process, security concerns, speed issues, as well as coordination problems.

The Central Duplicating area required an extra DocuTech 135 and approached Scott Zettner, from Xerox, with their requirements. Scott immediately realised that if they could produce the personalised portion of the documents within the overall job, they would be able to eliminate the problems associated with the existing disjointed approach.

Scott also recognised that many jobs sent outside of USAA could be returned, thus increasing the volume.

Along with a DocuTech 6180, Paris Software was proposed as a method of merging the personalised and fixed portions of the applications automatically.

New applications are being added regularly however the typical advantages of the Paris/DocuTech combination are significant cost reductions, greater confidentiality, reduced error, shorter turn-around, and greater personalisation.

Paris is a powerful document design, distribution and retrieval system that enables you to effortlessly create attractive and informative documents from your existing printstream data. Integrated with complimentary products, Paris can then distribute those documents anywhere via print, fax, email and archive.

For more information about Paris and other Output Management Solutions and Services, please email us at info@outputpeople.com or click on the "request info" icon at the top of this page.