The Mako(TM) SDK adds value to the Racami transactional workflow

The Challenge

In transactional workflows one of the challenges is standardizing the multitude of data and print streams that are commonly used. This is important because the variety of file formats and the inconsistency in how they are constructed causes work to slow down or be of poor quality: data preparation slows down, printers slow down, jobs are constrained to specific workflows and equipment. Normalization is the key to solving this problem. Racami saw an opportunity to make their product more mature, to access new revenue streams and better support customers by offering normalization as standard in Alchem-e™. But they needed to make sure they could achieve the speed and predictability required when converting documents from PostScript or PCL into PDF and that the PDFs conformed to industry standards.

Racami had a further challenge to meet: in converting PostScript to PDF they did not want to lose the print instructions that are embedded into PostScript; they needed the ability to reverse the conversion back to PS from the PDF with the print instructions intact.

The Solution

Matt Mahoney, executive VP of Sales and Marketing at Racami comments: "As companies mature with multi-channel communications for marketing and transaction processing, they benefit from clean optimized PDF files. We are extremely happy with our choice to work with Global Graphics. We embed their Mako technology into Alchem-eTM and offer it as a standalone PDF preflight tool. Our partnership with Global Graphics gives our customers access to the best minds in the industry for PDF and PostScript workflows."

Racami has embedded Mako technology into Alchem-e™ to speed up processing, reduce file sizes, and produce higher quality output when converting to PDF. Racami had evaluated a variety of PDF optimization tools but found that they would stall, hiccup or fail in some area of the processing.

"They weren’t primetime ready for all the different scenarios you find inside PDFs," says Matt. "The results using Mako are rock solid both in terms of speed and reliability and there have been no issues compared with the competitive products we looked at. The support we’ve received from Global Graphics has been consistency excellent which you need to know when you are dealing with mission critical work."

Racami customers buy Alchem-e™ to solve a multitude of workflow issues. With regards to post-composition reengineering, a customer may have composition systems that output PostScript. They may be working in monochrome but want to add color or to route documents to another facility altogether which needs a different barcode for inserter control. They don’t really want to go back to composition to make changes and it’s much easier and more reliable to take the PostScript files and convert them to PDF.

Another use case is with customers who need to merge jobs in PostScript and PDF to fill a roll on a continuous feed printer for production printing. Racami uses Mako to combine the files together into one single very large PDF and Mako optimizes those files to speed up processing by looking at where there might be multiple instances of the same font or a repeated image.

Multi-channel workflows are dependent on flipping between print streams, PDF, SMS, and other formats for each channel. Alchem-e™ with the embedded Mako engine is capable of converting a single PDF for a live conversation or processing a batch of 50,000 documents. That kind of flexibility is needed in real-time and batch communications with consumers.

Racami has completely incorporated Mako into the Alchem-e™ system, so its customers simply use Alcheme’s screens to setup their workflows. When setting up a workflow that requires a print stream transform, the Alchem-e™ user just drops that transform into the workspace just like any other task to be automated.

Exceptional support

Global Graphics Software has been responsive to Racami’s needs throughout, providing fast turnaround on features and issues and providing direct contact to the Mako product manager. One such example is Racami’s desire to hold onto the print directives that are expressed as PostScript comments between pages so that PostScript devices can respond by changing trays or printing out a certain number of copies. It was important for Racami to retain this information when the file is converted back to PostScript from PDF. Global Graphics Software provided a solution to show this information as annotations in the PDF.

The result

Mako is proving to be mission critical in Alchem-e™ and Global Graphics Software has provided a consistent level of support which is vital because Racami’s customers have to deliver against tight, and often regulatory, deadlines. Mahoney adds: "PDF is going to be around for a long time and Global Graphics’ SDK allows Racami to add more print and eDelivery features to the Alchem-eTM system. Our customers can rest easy knowing that when it comes to Postscript, PCL, and PDF processing, they have the combined expertise of Racami and Global Graphics. Together there is not much we can’t solve."

About Racami

Racami LLC is a fast-growing and innovative multi-national software and IT services company that improves the performance of customer communication processes and advances multi-channel initiatives. Racami is revolutionizing the way customer communications are produced and distributed using its flagship customer communications management (CCM) platform Alchem-e™. In addition to their software, Racami provides industry specialized professional services and software development for insurance, financial, healthcare, book publishing, and marketing companies.