Corporate documents under control
Managing corporate written communication in a large company can be an arduous task. Find out how Letter will help you take control over all documents, how you will be able to easily propagate changes from master documents to their templates and how Letter easily integrates with the existing business processes to act as a reliable and powerful document generation solution.
Managing corporate written communication in a large company can be an arduous task. How do you enforce the compliance of all documents issued in your company with predefined corporate design and legal guidelines?
Perhaps a set of corporate templates has already been created but is it actually applied across all your line of business applications?
Find out how Letter will help you take control over the written communication of your company, how you will be able to propagate changes from master documents to their templates and how Letter can easily integrate with your existing business processes to act as a reliable document generation solution.
What is Letter?
Letter is a cloud-based document composition software that enables the standardization of all written documents issued by companies of all sizes.
It enables the creation of masters and templates, which will be stored in the cloud and available to authorized users only. Masters and templates will have protected fields, avoiding the risks of intentional or deliberate tampering.
What if your company has to generate large quantities of standardized and personalized documents?
Letter works like a document factory. It is the ideal solution for organizations that produce a high volume of complex, template based documents on repetitive processes: letters, statements, invoices, marketing materials, reports, e-mails, etc.
To work like a factory, letter needs data, which is already available in your line-of-business applications. Letter easily integrates with your existing business processes to act as a reliable document generation solution. Whenever your business system has to generate documents, it feeds data into letter’s web services and final documents are produced.
All your documents will be standardized in three easy steps: create master, produce template and generate documents.
Key features
Powerful document factory - Letter is the ideal solution for organizations that have to generate large quantities of documents, such as letters, payroll statements, invoices and many more. This is a highly scalable mass document generator that can produce thousands of documents per day by merging your transactional data with corporate templates.
Templates versioning - Whenever a master changes, all associated templates are automatically updated with the new image, structure and legal statement. Any document generated after the update will comply with the new content of its template. Letter also enables the existence of the same template in multiple languages, providing true internationalization support for global companies.
Integration - Exposes REST and SOAP based web services to allow external applications or BPM systems to generate corporate documents, by providing only the process data.
Ready for SuccessFactors® - Letter is ready to be integrated with SuccessFactors homepage. It enables you to generate corporate HR documents for yourself or your team.
Does it fit your organization?
Letter is a highly scalable solution. It has been developed for organizations of all sizes.
It will be advantageous for all those who have to enforce the compliance of written documents with predefined corporate design and legal guidelines.
We present three examples of corporate functional units that can benefit from Letter: Human Resources, Legal and QHSE.
Human Resources functional units have to generate thousands of personalized documents to employees each year. These documents have to be issued in different languages. There is a main employee system of record and an ecosystem of satellite HR applications, each of one with its own engine to generate documents. Letter will help them centralize all document generation needs, allowing them to create new templates that comply with legal norms.
Legal functional units have to be sure that corporate documents comply with legal norms and regulations. This is a very difficult task without a system of document control. Letter will provide them with the ability to easily generate masters and templates with protected fields, which avoid the risks of intentional or deliberate tampering. Letter will also help them protect the access to sensitive data, by determining who can view and edit each specific template.
All Quality, Health, Security and Environment (QHSE) documents (operations manual, quality manual, maintenance procedures, training procedures, job descriptions, etc.) have to be always updated and available to the whole company. Documents need to be periodically revised, so that new processes and improvements are introduced. Updated versions have then to be made available at all work sites and locations. Obsolete versions have to be removed and archived. Letter will make document generation and updating easier tasks, ensuring compliance with legal norms and corporate visual coherence. QHSE professionals will be able to quickly generate new templates and documents that will be available to employees from any device connected to the internet.
How it works
All your written communication will be standardized in three easy steps:
- Create a master document with your corporate image and styles;
- Produce a template document based on the master structure;
- Generate personalized final documents.
Masters and templates are created using a document authoring tool that everyone is familiar with: Microsoft Word. With the help of a specially crafted Word Add-In for Letter, compatible for Office 2007 all the way to the latest Office 2016, you are able to define editable areas and fields.
Master - The master is the first layer in document generation. It defines the global aesthetics of the document (e.g. corporate logo, text styles, table formatting, chapters, table of contents and other references, headers, footers, images). As a master editor, you will define blank areas in your document, which will be editable by the template editors. Any changes in the master will be propagated to all its templates.
Templates - The template document inherits all the styles and formatting defined by the master editor. However, the master is protected and does not allow modifications by the template editor. He/she is able to customize the editable areas, creating the content that will define its function (e.g. onboarding letter, bonus letter, customer invoice). The template editor is also able to create a data source by specifying which fields will be used in the document.
Document - The final document inherits all the styles, formatting and content fields defined in the template. The values for the content fields are provided by a web service integration with line-of-business applications. This functionality enables the easy and quick production of a high volume of documents.
Integration with corporate software
To work like a factory, Letter needs data, which is already available in your line-of-business applications. Letter easily integrates with your existing business processes to act as a reliable document generation solution. Our team will work with you to setup the most reliable and cost effective integration solution.
In complex technological scenarios, the master data required to generate documents has to be collected from multiple systems. An integration layer implemented on a corporate EAI software - like SAP HANA cloud Integrator of SAP Process Integration – will be the glue between your application and Letter.
In simple scenarios, a customized integration layer can be developed and deployed in your datacenter network.
Ready for SuccessFactors®
Letter has a ready-to-use tool for integration with SuccessFactors Employee Central. The Letter cloud extension to SuccessFactors allows you to generate corporate HR documents for you as an employee or about your team as a manager.
The SAP Hana cloud extension relies on the security configuration of SuccessFactors to show the Letter homepage title to authorized users, as well as the available actions to generate HR documents. The integration layer collects employee data from SuccessFactors OData integration endpoints, provides the master data to Letter and receives back a corporate HR document.
Other corporate systems
The integration with Letter can span multiple types of data sources and systems. Master data can be fetched from any system or application that implements web services. OData/REST web services are the current trend for data integration. SOAP/XML web services are long time standards for data exchange.
In HR scenarios, SuccessFactors, SAP Gateway and SAP RFC calls through ICF are the most used sources to collect employees’ master data.
Master data can also be fetched directly from corporate databases. All relational database engines provide a standard connectivity protocol like ODBC or specialized protocols like ADO.NET or JDBC.
All mid-sizes and large companies have some form of corporate directory. They are a common source for employee data and other resources. For directory data in the cloud, Microsoft offers Azure Active Directory Graph REST API. On premises directory services expose an LDAP API interface.
Proprietary binary protocols can also be used for integration scenarios. One common case is the direct invocation of SAP RFC’s through an RFC server.
Summary
Letter is the tool you are looking for to manage and control the written communication in your company. Final documents will always comply with the guidelines of their template, which will comply with its master’s structure and style. At the same time, you will have full control on who can view and edit each master and template. Users will also need authorizations to be able to generate documents.
Letter is easy to use. Masters and templates are created using a document authoring tool that everyone is familiar with - Microsoft Word - with the help of a specially crafted Word Add-In for Letter.
But Letter is also a powerful document factory. This highly scalable mass document generator can produce thousands of documents per day by merging transactional data with corporate templates.
To work like a factory, Letter needs data, which is already available in your line-of-business applications. Letter easily integrates with your existing business processes to act as a reliable document generation solution. Our team will work with you to setup the most effective integration solution.
