Importance of CCM Rationalization
Imagine that you got your start as a template developer decades ago tasked with the job of creating new policy forms or claims letters in a system like Documaker or Documerge (owned by Docucorp at the time). You have a spec document in-hand and, knowing that all of the current templates share common header & footer styling, start looking for some existing building blocks to work with. However, you quickly discover that some of the data requirements in your spec differ slightly, so you are unable to re-use an existing header or footer without reformatting field data. Thus, you decide that the easiest approach is to simply copy an existing header/footer template to create a new one and make slight formatting changes to match the spec.
Now, consider that this practice continues for a couple of decades as template developers come and go, and you can easily imagine how cluttered a template library can become with resources that are often redundant and outdated. All of which conspire to degrade customers experiences.
Why Rationalization is Important
Most most organizations only focus on content rationalization when it comes time to migrate to a new CCM/UX platform, but it’s really a practice that should be considered on an ongoing basis as a matter of maintaining a lean, focused solution. As time passes by, systems are upgraded to introduce new features and enhancements, many of which solve real problems that seemed impossible to accommodate years ago. Reasons for splitting near-identical content out no longer exist, so whether you deal with consolidation as a matter of proper library hygiene or wait until it comes time to migrate, it’s a critical task to ensure that your libraries don’t suffer from redundancy creep and the costs and headaches associated with it.
Our Approach To Rationalization
We approach rationalization differently from almost every other vendor in the industry. Most companies position rationalization as a facet of conversion and thus rationalize against printed output (PDF, AFP, PCL, etc) or specification documents, utilizing AI for semantic analysis to identify near-duplicate content. To be effective, this requires analysis across thousands of documents for every possible use-case, which is a near impossibility for most client applications as they rarely have sufficient test data coverage or original documentation. Additionally, rationalizing from “flat” output completely disregards all of the data-driven assembly rules that were inherent in the source system, resulting in a consolidation plan that doesn’t grasp the details and introduces risk and uncertainty into the migration.
Our approach to rationalization focuses on the SOURCE resources themselves. Since MigrationXpress Rationalizer reads directly from Documaker, Documerge, Crystal Reports and other source system into an exchange format, we have the ability to rationalize against every bit of original content from the source system. We establish similarity scoring across 4 different dimensions (layout, content, style and data) and organize everything into similarity groups for further review and analysis. A footer that would be identified as redundant by other rationalization systems might have meaningful differences with data origination – something that the MX Rationalizer can easily account for.
MX Rationalizer – Overview
As mentioned previously, MX Rationalizer is designed with different aspirations in mind. Rather than building yet another tool to facilitate migrations, we wanted to provide the market with a service that could support conversions AND consistently audit libraries for redundancies that increase costs with staffing, maintenance and infrastructure.
MX Rationalizer empowers the business by providing the following key features:
- Tuned Analysis – MX Rationalizer can be tuned for differing similarity weightings across layout, content, style and data. Additionally, tolerances can be set for similarity thresholds, position tolerances and text matching allow the business to process & consider multiple scenarios.
- Executive Summary – a top-down overview of consolidation findings, including total number of similarity groupings, overall consolidation potential, projected resource reduction and more.
- Raw Summary Data – top-level consolidation summary data available in CSV format to support custom reporting and packaging for decision-makers.
MX Rationalizer – Detailed Analysis
Since MX Rationalizer works directly with source content, it can provide fine-grained reporting on similarity groups to illustrate exactly how resources differ across multiple dimensions. This provides project teams with actionable data meant to drive intelligent decision-making around resource consolidation.
MX Rationalizer empowers project teams by providing the following key details:
- Similarity Groupings: resources are organized by multi-dimensional similarities with “keeper” file selection. The keeper is identified as the centroid within the group (most common similarities). Additionally, each file has color-coded confidence scoring relative to the keeper in the group.
- Detailed Differences: interactive difference viewer to show specific differences across all dimensions between the keeper file and other files within the similarity group.
- Raw Detail Data: detailed similarity, consolidation and duplication scoring data across all dimensions available in CSV format to drive team consolidation plans and associated tasks.
Whether you are facing a migration or simply biding time with a legacy CCM application, consolidating your customer communications through proper rationalization can result in significant efficiency gains and improved customer experiences. In closing, there are two lessons to remember – don’t wait until it’s time to migrate to rid yourself of duplicative clutter hampering your legacy communications solution, and don’t be tempted to rationalize using output as you’ll never get sufficient test-cases to ensure an accurate consolidation of content. Rationalization against original source will always result in the most accurate, predictable, and cost-effective consolidation plan.