This morning in the weekly management meeting we were treated to a demonstration of software that supposedly reduced the time to complete a task from 40 hours to mere minutes. This I had to see.
The task involved splitting out one giant pdf file into individual files based on certain criteria. Previously, someone would have to look for specific information that signals a "set" of pages for a specific recipient. He would then manually print only those pages to a file, re-name it, and then manually email the file to the recipient using a secure email. Sometimes the pdf file is over 1,000 pages, and this task can take up to a full week for one person to complete.
Someone named Bradford figured out that Adobe has a partner program with developers who create plug-ins that can be used within Adobe Acrobat. A tool called Evermap has two plug-ins that seem suited to automating the tasks above: 1) Split pdf and 2) Automail.
The split pdf plug-in uses built-in OCR functionality within Adobe to identify the criteria to split the pdf to create the recipient-specific files. The tool looks for a user-specified phrase anywhere in the document or within a user-defined section of each page. The tool also supports auto-naming the files, which can be based on another data element from the pdf. Once Bradford clicked the button, it was like magic watching all the separate pdf files show up in the folder.
The Automail plug-in has the ability to extract an email address from the pdf and send all the files to the correct recipients automatically. There's even an option to exclude a particular email address, which he used to exclude the company's email address so that the emails are only sent to the recipients.
These are some nifty tools. I wonder how long they've been performing this task the old-fashioned way. I bet many years. Leave it up to someone named Bradford to come to the rescue.
The task involved splitting out one giant pdf file into individual files based on certain criteria. Previously, someone would have to look for specific information that signals a "set" of pages for a specific recipient. He would then manually print only those pages to a file, re-name it, and then manually email the file to the recipient using a secure email. Sometimes the pdf file is over 1,000 pages, and this task can take up to a full week for one person to complete.
Someone named Bradford figured out that Adobe has a partner program with developers who create plug-ins that can be used within Adobe Acrobat. A tool called Evermap has two plug-ins that seem suited to automating the tasks above: 1) Split pdf and 2) Automail.
The split pdf plug-in uses built-in OCR functionality within Adobe to identify the criteria to split the pdf to create the recipient-specific files. The tool looks for a user-specified phrase anywhere in the document or within a user-defined section of each page. The tool also supports auto-naming the files, which can be based on another data element from the pdf. Once Bradford clicked the button, it was like magic watching all the separate pdf files show up in the folder.
The Automail plug-in has the ability to extract an email address from the pdf and send all the files to the correct recipients automatically. There's even an option to exclude a particular email address, which he used to exclude the company's email address so that the emails are only sent to the recipients.
These are some nifty tools. I wonder how long they've been performing this task the old-fashioned way. I bet many years. Leave it up to someone named Bradford to come to the rescue.
Sure there are errors and bugs in software, but people do make mistakes too. :)