Requirement
Intercarve partnered with MPX, a Portland, ME-based document and data solutions company, to deliver extremely time-sensitive merger notification packages to customers of a large financial services company after a previous vendor could not meet the delivery requirements. Timing of delivery was critical to meet the mandated deadlines tied to the merger’s federal approval process.
Challenges
- Generate information for 165,000 ready-to-print customer shipping labels.
- Notification package materials had to be printed, their labels affixed and the packages delivered to UPS in 24 hours.
- Labels had to be integrated with UPS WorldShip using their XML API.
- Packages had to be programmatically rendered and produced in-line because there was not enough time to produce and affix the UPS labels to packages individually.
Approach
Overnight, Intercarve built several data processing scripts to read, sanitize, transform and split large CSV files from the client. Another script read this output to produce shipment labels corresponding to notification packages being generated by other team members. Utilized a large Amazon AWS EC2 instance to run the output script in parallel.
Results
- Generating the 165,000 labels in parallel decreased processing time to 40 minutes, from an expected 24 hours
- The client met the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority’s (FINRA) time-sensitive notification requirements and ultimately obtained approval for the merger.
- Intercarve’s success with this project helped MPX convert this project into new business with the client. Shortly after completion of the project, MPX onboarded the client to its real -time letter printing & posting API (also developed in conjunction with Intercarve).