Cegetel Groupe, part of Vivendi Universal, is France's leading private telecommunications operator, serving 16 million customers for mobile and fixed-line telephony. As their aggressive growth strategy began to yield excellent results in mid-1999, the company decided to augment its outsourced document output strategy by implementing a true automated document factory (ADF) solution.

The contract went to Pitney Bowes Management Services, whose highly efficient document distribution service offered the highest level of document integrity, speed and accuracy. Most important to Cegetel executives was the ability of the ADF's data tracking information to produce unprecedented levels of analysis on document production, which facilitated proactive decision making and provided an optimum, closed-loop message management process. The facility has become a showcase site for companies interested in establishing their own ADF.

Cegetel wanted to keep close control of the process and avoid the increasing cost of outsourcing to a service bureau. Over a three-month period, Pitney Bowes Management Services converted an old cake factory into a state of the art data center, hard-wiring the building to handle the complex network of technology needed to fulfill their goal: the ability to handle large volumes of documents in a tightly controlled environment.

"Although the hardware systems were very important to Cegetel, software was the main factor in driving our project to success," said Jean Pierre Libert, managing director of Pitney Bowes Management Services France who played an important part in the creation, launch, and management of the Cegetel ADF Project. "Cegetel understands that data is their most important corporate asset."

Pitney Bowes Management Services utilized StreamWeaver software from Pitney Bowes docSense to create a mail run data file (MRDF) to support file-based processing on intelligent inserters for the maximum in mail piece integrity and flexibility. StreamWeaver is also used to automatically manage reprint process. Document control codes tracked all transactions across the system and confirmed the integrity of each mail piece through every step in the finishing process. To accommodate the high-volume of billing and statement mail, two 9 Series and one Series 8 Inserting Systems were installed, completed since by one Series 12.

"Our initial results were excellent-- for about 20% of the cost of a classic service bureau we were able to deliver much higher per piece integrity," said Libert. "But the prize was always better control, and in that we outdid our own expectations."

Every marketing insert put out by Cegetel has a barcode used for tracking purposes. The company analyzes the effectiveness of its marketing campaigns to classify customers in numerous categories to determine which of five possible inserts are to be used.

A web-enabled tracking module posts workflow reports each morning, and allows piece level information from each step of the production process to be accessed from the company portal. Document managers, Customer Service Represenatives and executives can see when a document was received, printed, inserted and delivered to post office.

Each process step is time and date stamped providing valuable information for CRM and production efficiency needs. The ability to extract, collect, and consolidate the pertinent data From each mail piece, at each work step, on all the equipment for every job into one database gave Cegetel a more accurate view of their productivity.

As a result, Pitney Bowes Management Services is able to calculate costs and profitability more quickly and measure the effectiveness of the production process to help achieve the highest level of efficiency.

After their initial success, Cegetel increased the volume substantially over the next few months so that the ADF was processing 25 million pages and 5 million envelopes per month. They added a third IBM Infoprint 4000 printer. An APS 18 high-speed inserter was added to the shop last summer and another APS 18 will be added by the end of the year.

The level of service has been such that Cegetel extended the contract with Pitney Bowes Management Services to continue to provide closed-loop end-to-end customer messaging solutions until at least 2005.