ISIS Papyrus

ISIS Papyrus is a Swiss-based commercial software development group that sells its products in 42 countries either directly or through business partners. ISIS Papyrus specializes in standard software products for consolidated customer communication and process optimization solutions for enterprise organizations in the financial, utility, telecommunications, healthcare, insurance and public sectors.

With 16 worldwide offices, 14 subsidiaries and three development centers ISIS Papyrus supports more than 2,000 enterprise and government customers worldwide who are using their solutions for process improvement, business correspondence, multi-channel output, e-mail, document capture and archiving. Software development is performed in Austria, Italy and Germany.

History

Group Structure

ISIS Holding AG, Zug, Switzerland (1991, Privately held parent company)
ISIS Papyrus Software AG, Zug Switzerland (1991)
ISIS Information Systems GmbH, Ma. Enzersdorf, Austria (1988)
ISIS Marketing Service GmbH (1991)
ISIS Knowledge Systems GmbH (1999)
ISIS Papyrus America, Inc., Southlake, TX (1992)
ISIS Papyrus Deutschland GmbH, Düsseldorf, BRD (2002)
ISIS Papyrus Asia Pacific Ltd., Singapore (1993)
ISIS Papyrus UK Ltd., Kingsclere (1997)
ISIS Papyrus Italy SRL, Ivrea (1998)
ISIS Papyrus France S.A., Paris (2005)
ISIS Toth SL, Madrid, Spain (1997, Joint venture)
ISIS Papyrus Netherlands SA, (2008)

Common Applications

Most common applications implemented with Papyrus:

• High volume billing for utilities, telecoms, mail order business, insurance
• Account and investment statements, client reporting for bank customers
• Insurance policies and claims processing
• Document scanning, capture and extraction for bank transfer slips
• Inbound invoice processing
• Content management
• Mortgage selling and customer care
• New customer sign-on in banking
• Correspondence template creation
• Loan application

ISIS Papyrus Business Concepts

According to interviews with the principals on the World Business Review with Caspar Weinberger, the ISIS Papyrus Group has a strong customer focus. Also recently, Chief Architect Max J. Pucher stated in an article in the Fort Worth Business Press that quality rather than cost reduction must be the management focus at all times to ensure customer loyalty. In an interview in the German BIT magazine Annemarie Pucher said that revenue is not a business target but rather achieving a balanced triangle between customers, employees and owners.

ISIS Papyrus only delivers standard software. It never customizes this software for a particular client. Enhancements are always part of the standard product delivery. ISIS Papyrus does also not offer any APIs (application programming interfaces) because they create a rigid structure with the customer and are not portable between operating system platforms. All modules are developed in C++ operating system independent source code and do not use platform specific libraries such as MS-MFC or similar. Therefore all modules are identical on all platforms.

ISIS Papyrus has a degressive pricing model for multiple copies rather than offering arbitrary discounts from the list price. All customers receive those same discounts. ISIS Papyrus offers a maintenance agreement that protects the investment into the software. Software under maintenance can be traded in for new products or switched to other operating systems for the difference in list price. The maintenance does in most cases include ALL software upgrades AND version changes. The maintenance also includes the support of the Project Quality Assurance, a team that supports the customers in the implementation and early production phase.

ISIS Papyrus has a professional certification program for its consultants and its business partners resulting in a large international group of consultants that perform customer projects.

Technology & Innovation

One of the most important innovations of ISIS Papyrus was the mandatory use of an electronic document format for document management rather than driving the printers directly. The ISIS concept is to make the application program independent of the printer hardware. In 1994 that step was a true innovation. Lacking any other well documented format ISIS used the IBM AFP datastream format that is still in widespread use for high volume applications. The most important benefit of using such a format was the standardization of all document resources such as fonts, images and forms and therefore the ability to chose the print destination and print technology only at time of print. Till today other vendors generate only one print stream at a time and thus supply no electronic original that could be post-processed and archived. PDF has partly taken the role of the electronic original since it has been standardized as PDF/A. PDF is still not well suited for very high-volume applications.

The key difference to other DOM (Document Output Management) vendors is the script-based formatting language defined in the fully graphical Papyrus Designer. Formatting throughput is up to 50 million pages per hour. Approximately 50% of all documents supplied with issued American Credit Cards are formatted with the Papyrus formatting engine at the largest service organizations.

In 1997 ISIS started to provide the Papyrus Client, a user interactive front-end for letter generation that is fully compatible to the DocEXEC formatting engine. It became immediately apparent that providing users with interactive document capabilities requires to control the related document process. Customers developed their own user interfaces or integrated the Papyrus Client into workflow scenarios with a huge effort. ISIS decided to provide an extremely flexible application front-end to reduce the development effort and provide tightly integrated change management for content and process applications. This architecture was named Papyrus Objects.

To manage this application environment a central facility was needed which was named Papyrus WebRepository. While the Papyrus Objects architecture was initially provided as a front-end workflow mechanism, over the years it turned into a powerful platform because of customer needs. The first large installations were done in 2001. The applications capabilities were marketed into the document management arena as 'The Document Switchboard'. With the addition of a rules engine, data federation adapters, the WebPortal and full versioning the system is now referred to as 'The Papyrus Platform' for content and process management.

In 1999 ISIS Papyrus acquired the Document Capture specialist Improx AG, whose Machine Learning Document Classification technology was then integrated into the Papyrus Platform, making ISIS the very first vendor to propose an Inbound-Process-Outbound ECM (Enterprise Content Management) scenario in 2001.

The backbone of the ISIS Papyrus Platform is a distributed object-relational database which is configured automatically by object definitions in WebRepository. Through its patented object-oriented Enterprise Service Bus bus it communicates with all servers and PCs in a network independently of the operating system. It enables versioned changes of object definitions throughout the system from a single point. The ISIS Papyrus Platform enables in the terms of Forrester Research dynamic business applications.

Studies have shown that this architecture saves huge amounts of maintenance costs in typical enterprise applications by reducing application development time, change management, business agility and empowers non-technical users to adapt business processes and content as needed without involving IT experts.

Other studies have recognized the rich features of the ISIS Papyrus solutions for specific applications such as the Automated Document Factory and TransPromo, respectively. At the same time authors have acknowledged the importance of the integrated flexible workflow capabilities of ISIS Papyrus.

See also

• Papyrus Platform
• Document management system
• Complex event processing

External links

• ISIS Papyrus Homepage
• Welcome to the Real World!, politically incorrect thoughts on IT by Max J. Pucher, founder and Chief Architect of ISIS Papyrus
• ISIS Papyrus Platform Architecture The Chief Architect’s News Blog
• The ISIS Times Online
• Die ISIS Times Online (German Edition)

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