Central document conversion with efficient rendition service at Gebrüder Weiss GmbH

With around 6,000 employees, 150 company sites and an annual turnover of EUR 1.2 billion (2013), Gebrüder Weiss is one of the leading names in transport and logistics in Europe. In addition to its core business of overland transport, air & sea freight, and logistics, the company also offers a range of highly specialized industry solutions under the umbrella of Gebrüder Weiss Holding AG, based in Lauterach (Austria). Integrating its services in this way enables the group to react to customer requirements in a quick and flexible manner. The family company implements an array of ecological, economical and social measures, making it a pioneer with regard to sustainable business operations.

Application requirements
For converting documents, Gebrüder Weiss originally used open source software in conjunction with its in-house solution. However, certain file formats were not supported, so the company evaluated and licensed the conversion solution developed by a competitor of PDF Tools AG as part of an archive migration. However, when implementing the solution, the company found it to be unstable and inefficient.

The company required more efficient software in order to provide a rendition service. The solution needed to convert documents from a central location, be able to quickly integrate new document types and, above all, guarantee high performance and stability. The 3?Heights™ Document Converter by PDF Tools AG was the first product to meet all of the company’s requirements. In addition to its professional maintenance service, the software boasts a high throughput rate during conversion and is simple to integrate into existing IT landscapes thanks to a web service interface.

Implementation
The 3?Heights™ Document Converter was integrated as a web service into the transport and logistics group’s IT environment and now acts as the central service for document conversion. A customer-specific version of the 3?Heights™ Image to PDF Converter is employed for additional functions such as cropping and combining images.

Benefits
Gebrüder Weiss has implemented the new conversion service on an international scale at its IT services headquarters, scan center and document archive. Hundreds of thousands of documents have been processed so far, and a much greater volume is planned for the future. API interfaces were a simple way of integrating the software into specialist applications. Over the course of the project, Gebrüder Weiss was able to rely on quick and qualified support and test the software without things becoming complicated.

Thanks to its streamlined, virtual platform using a single CPU, the conversion solution provided by PDF Tools AG enabled the company to replace obsolete architecture based across several CPU cores. Since its introduction, the new solution has been extremely efficient and stable.

View complete success story: Central document conversion with efficient rendition service at Gebrüder Weiss GmbH