Karl Schumacher: The Trip of a Lifetime

by P.C. McGrew, EDP

In our industry there are boat loads of technicians, engineers, and sale professionals, but very few visionaries. Karl Schumacher, president of Pitney Bowes docSense is one of those rarities, a man with a vision of document processing technology that is independent of the output media and a company to back it up.

Schumacher’s official biography cites his rise in the Pitney Bowes organization through positions in product development, marketing and strategic planning. But that biography is only part of the story. He was one of the guiding lights behind the Pitney Bowes Document Factory, formulating their Production Mail EDP-to-Mail, Host-to-Post, and Automated Document Factory strategies before settling in to lead the docSense organization in the development of the Digital Document Delivery (D3™) platform. Under the docSense logo, Schumacher has ownership of Professional Services, D3, StreamWeaverâ, SiteView for job profiling, and other related technology.

His background is only a part of the story. To talk to Karl Schumacher is to understand his passion for the industry, his understanding of its evolution, and his vision of the possibilities. DPT talked with him about his mission to “create raving fans” of the docSense product line and his view of the industry.

We started with Pitney Bowes as a company. Schumacher says that while they are among the top 200 companies in patent ownership as a result of the corporate investment in research and development, three-quarters of their research is driven by the business needs presented by the business units and their customers. Among their areas of expertise are encryption, Java/J2EE, and secure transfer environments, as well as a wide range of print and mail engineering technologies. He noted that they do not just grow their knowledge internally, however. Pitney Bowes has made some strategic acquisitions, including StreamWeaver and, most recently, Alysis Technologies.

With the Alysis purchase they gained the WorkOut server, which had been the lynchpin of @Work’s product offering when it was acquired by Alysis. Schumacher says, “We took Jim Flynn’s WorkOut server, integrated some modular offerings of our own to create Digital Document Delivery (D3), and never looked back.” They did the same with the StreamWeaver print engineering software, and used them to build a core of products and services that allows the customer to build a more strategic approach to their document needs.

“We look at documents as a customer-centric process beginning with creation, then production, distribution, and receipt, which then loops back to update the enterprise database before beginning anew. Today Pitney Bowes docSense’s mission is to create customer and shareholder value through the creation of efficient and effective documents in hardcopy and digital documents,” says Schumacher. Starting from creation, customers should determine the strategic objectives of the document, then take a holistic approach to determining the document life cycle. “So many ecommerce customer initiatives grew up from great ideas to let the customer interact digitally with their documents, but didn’t connect to the reality of hard copy.” To make that happen, he says, you have to create a process that doesn’t care about the output medium, and that was the basis for building the docSense offerings.

Part of that strategy, the acquisition of StreamWeaver, gave docSense one of the industry standards to integrate. Today StreamWeaver is widely installed in high volume output environments as a print engineering tool that allows customers to add post-processing to their output. Schumacher expects StreamWeaver to get another shot in the arm as a bridge product when XML interchange becomes more of an industry standard. He expects the XML output from StreamWeaver to supply data to other Pitney Bowes products as well as to other vendor systems, though this may take a while. He says that from his vantage point he is not seeing customers move meaningfully towards these new standards; EDI is still cranking away.* However, as the requirements for postal evidencing* become more prevalent, as they are in Europe, and postal discounts require more sophisticated sorting and marking, installations of products like StreamWeaver in concert with Finalist, the docSense solution for CASS (Coding Accuracy Support System) certification will continue to grow.

Schumacher says that as a vendor he had to take steps to re-educate his staff about the possibilities and variations in every step of the document life cycle chain so that they could communicate the value of the services they provide to the customer. “There is no purpose in doing all of this unless more attention is paid to the full creation to update loop, automating the update of enterprise databases from incoming data.” He believes that this is the value that Pitney Bowes docSense brings to its customers.

At the same time that Schumacher has been building the docSense brand and its offerings, he has been tasked by his corporate management to create a consolidated billing site where a customer doing business with any Pitney Bowes entity can gain access through a single sign-on and manage their entire relationship with the company. It’s a huge project because it touches software sales, their SimplePostage* customer-facing environment, and their ASP facilities, with requirements to touch data from SAP, Siebel, Broadvision and other internal systems as well as their own ecommerce environment.

A project like this takes the cooperation and coordination of hundreds of people, from technicians to management, over a sustained period. It takes the cooperation of contractors and vendors to Pitney Bowes, as well as internal users and suppliers. Schumacher was told that if he could sell this project internally, he would be able to sell it anywhere.* So he went to work doing the internal bridge building and re-education that projects like this take, and is now seeing the fruits of his labor. During mid-2002 he expects the internal targets to be met and his staff to be re-aligned to move the solution into a repeatable process for any Pitney Bowes docSense customer.

Part of the work involves the evolution of the company beyond the bounds of selling a piece of hardware or software to a partnership with customers with the goal of building and keeping a long term relationship. Part of the evolution within the docSense organization has been a change in the sales organization. Where there used to be heavy emphasis on sales with no pre-sales support*, the new organization is divided between a force that is 40% pre-sales oriented and 40% sales oriented.* With this change Schumacher hopes that “we can evolve ourselves from being perceived in the limited sphere of document engineering as a provider of tools to being perceived as understanding all of the customers needs, including legal and compliance issues, as well as the business process.”

So what does the future hold? Schumacher says that the document output industry moves slowly. If you go back to the early 1990’s, he says, we saw things promised at shows like Xplor that are only now being realized. There will not be cataclysmic change, but a relentless change of view of the document process. “People will get to where there is true data independence from the document’s medium so that they can build document repositories from legacy and news systems. From there they will be able to populate new flexible systems using flexible document composition tools.” Schumacher believes that products like Quark, Word and Interpress will become the interfaces of choice, even though they may be weak in some of the features we are used to in our industry.

Schumacher also sees a world where the “design engines will drive generators that have totally flexible output options.” But the most interesting prediction was that “companies will offer customer delivery preference files so that customers control the presentation of the information they see.” That would be a fulfillment of one of the early promises of web-enabled applications!

“All of us were point solution providers, now we all want to be sustained, consistent solutions providers. It’s a hard trip to make, but it’s the trip of a lifetime.”

Karl Schumacher is clearly a man with a vision that is customer-centric. He sees the potential of today’s technology, but he knows it will take time to see it implemented and accepted.