Credit Union Automatically Archives 2.5 Million Pages
from an AS/400 System

Case Study 16

Problem:

A very successful Consumer Credit Union in Europe handles over 380,000 live credit accounts, over 2.5 million print pages per month. Legally, account transactions are required to be archived for 5 years and accounting information for 10. The Credit Union runs a number of different reporting applications including JD Edwards popular One World applications for banking, FISERV and homegrown applications. Unfortunately, most archiving programs for the AS/400 are proprietary within their own enterprise application areas are and quite costly. In addition, these applications when running can use up quite a bit of a system's resources. What this Credit Union wanted was an add on capability that could archive the output from a variety of applications on their AS/400, not impact production and produce compressed, secure (non- alterable) archival data that could be easily stored and retrieved. They want all of this a very cost effective prices, not the potentially stratospheric range of previous alternatives.

Solution:

The client installed and evaluated OctoPDF and RPM Remote Print Manager in 3 days without any vendor assistance. As a versatile and robust LPD, RPM Select from Brooks Internet Software was used to receive data from the AS/400 and its many applications. Queues were set up to take the report and account data and pass it on to the OctoPDF software. The reports were converted automatically into a PDF format using OctoPDF for archiving to disk (4 GByte DVDs). The PDF format provided the easy access to the data when required by investigations and legal inquiries and allowed local printing of just the pertinent information. Archiving in a format which is not editable was very important as well. The OctoPDF software not only converted the data into PDF format but also facilitated storage and retrieval by automatically establishing storage directory and file names from the AS/400 source information without any human intervention. OctoPDF is Windows based and does not have any incremental charges based on speed of the AS/400 or number of processors. Unlike other solutions, OctoPDF can also service several AS/400 servers without separate licenses.

Typical Applications:

• Automatic Report Archiving
• Unattended Directory/File Name Management
• Protected - Non Editable Storage
• Financial Data (AR, AP, Payroll, Customer Account Statements)

Products Required: OctoPDF™ and RPM Remote Print Manager®