Burger purchased software from a company called StreamServe Inc. that advertises itself as a way to keep closer to your customers, and cut down on mailing costs, by allowing companies to consolidate invoices and other documents generated by enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems into single, personalized documents.
In Burger's case, a real-world application of the software looks like this: "We had a customer ramp up their demand tenfold, and we were faxing them our ERP invoices -- basically certifications of quality. We were flooding them with faxes," Burger recalls. With StreamServe software, Burger says, AET Films could "consolidate all these documents and send them in PDF format with a customer history and corporate logo." As manufacturers of oriented polypropylene films, AET Films provides, among other things, the stuff used to make potato chip bags and soda pop labels. "If you look at a Mountain Dew bottle, the little label that goes around that bottle, that's all us," Burger says.
AET Films paid about $115,000 for its EDP software and now spends 15% annually in product maintenance.
Burger credits the product with contributing to a 20% improvement in gross profit margin: "And our backlog of custom document requests has gone from 12 to 18 months to effectively zero," he says. Problem solved.
Ellen O'Brien, a former senior editor at CIO Decisions, is now a senior editor at Storage magazine. Write to her at eobrien@techtarget.com.
This was first published in April 2007