Save Money Through Better PDF Storage Practices—It’s a Snap
Excerpt: No matter why you are archiving your PDFs, it is important to make sure that your processes are efficient and as automated as possible. From a cost perspective, the files being produced should be the smallest size possible while still delivering a quality experience for recipients.
About the author: Jonathan Malone-McGrew, edp, has literally grown up around PDF and the print and digital communications industries. In his early years, he watched his parents build a successful print software company … Read more
If you are reading this, then you likely are storing large volumes of PDF files. The reasons you are archiving PDF will depend on your business and the products or services available to customers. For many of the organizations we work with, this is part of a service they offer for electronic presentment, electronic delivery, customer service lookups, and reprint services. For others, it is a method for keeping records of the print and digital items they produced and delivered. And still, for some, it is required to keep any produced and delivered communications for a period of time due to laws and regulations.
No matter why you are archiving your PDFs, it is important to make sure that your processes are efficient and as automated as possible. From a cost perspective, the files being produced should be the smallest size possible while still delivering a quality experience for recipients. This is the point where print and digital (or electronic) delivery starts to hit a snag for most organizations. The snag is that most PDF creation, make-ready, or prepress processes don’t have a great way to create multiple versions of a PDF that are optimized for the destinations. Moreover, many PDF optimization tools start to run into issues with large file sizes, heavy graphic content, or are not able to actually correct the structural problems within a PDF that result in large file sizes. Many times, preflight tools on the market today just warn you that something is wrong.
This is where we would like to introduce you to our recently announced Solimar Systems innovation: ReadyPDF® Prepress Server™. This solution is designed to be a prepress tool or a module in our Chemistry™ platform of workflow offerings including print management, tracking, reporting, enhancement, enrichment, and more. It should be important to you and your organization because it has been proven by customers already in production to save them significant costs and provide powerful ROI. These savings aren’t just from the size reduction of PDFs going into the archive system, but also includes areas we have recently written about including font handling and the ability to keep customer or Personally Identifiable Information (PII) safe and secure.
Since we are focused on the storage savings in this conversation, we would like to direct your attention to an actual proof point from one of our customers. A member of our Customer Advisory Council recently discussed with us the impact that ReadyPDF server has had on their live production environment. The results are business-changing; utilizing ReadyPDF server they are seeing size reductions that add up to actual storage requirements being 4% of the original file size. In another set of production files, they shared that the set of files went from 660 megabytes to 50 megabytes. That alone is near 7.5% of the original file size. While 660 MB to 50 MB might not seem like a lot, how that manifests itself in production is in groups of files that are 6.6 gigabytes. Those are now about half a gigabyte and are saving our customer significantly on processing times and storage costs.
Now, like automobiles, your mileage may vary with your PDF files. How do we get around that? We prove the value of our solution by offering free product evaluations. Plus, we have the ability to share our starter bundles that creates an easy understanding of the investment required and the potential ROI you could see. Our team truly believes you will see significant value, especially if you are a midsize to enterprise provider. Start on the path to optimized PDF by reaching out to us today.