From Computer Merchants Newsletter Dec 2006: [Download]

December 2006, Melbourne – CONVERT YOUR OS/400 OUTPUT TO PDF
In recent years there has been increasing demand from our customers to receive our purchase and sales agreements via email. You will be familiar with this paperwork from when you have either purchased equipment from us or we have bought your redundant gear.

This paperwork is produced from a contract system which runs on our AS/400. The challenge we faced was that the contract system was written over 15 years ago when email was not a common form of communication and therefore no provision was made for it in the design of the program. The contract system produced a printed output which we then faxed directly to our customers. If we did need to send the document via email we had no option but to scan the document first, a very time consuming exercise.

After looking at various options, Computer Merchants chose to use Wilkinson Electronic Document Solutions to help solve the problem. Using their “WilComm” product Wilkinson has implemented a solution that automatically outputs our purchase and sales agreements to a PDF file. We had the option of either storing this output to a central file on our network or having it emailed to the individual user that created the output. We chose the latter. Now with a click of a button our users can create an agreement and have it automatically emailed to them which they can then forward on to the customer.

The WilComm solution has proved to be a huge time saver for our staff. Prior to implementing it we were faxing about 95% of our agreements. We are now emailing about this quantity and faxing only about 5%. Our customers are happy as they are receiving the paperwork in the form that they requested. If you have a similar problem we can highly recommend using the WilComm product.