Inventive Designers
| Company type | Private company |
|---|---|
| Industry | Software |
| Headquarters | |
Key people | Guy Dehond, Founder & CEO Klaas Bals, CTO |
Number of employees | 32 (January 2011) |
| Website | http://www.inventivedesigners.com |
Inventive Designers is a privately owned software development company, founded in 1994 by Guy Dehond and Patrick Morren.
The company specializes in standard software solutions for customer communications, automated document factory and output process optimization for enterprises in the public, financial, telecommunications, utility, insurance and healthcare industry. Inventive Designers has enterprise customers in over 30 countries.
History
| 1994 | Inventive Designers BVBA founded by Guy Dehond and Patrick Morren in Belgium | |
|---|---|---|
| 1996 | Alteration of Inventive Designers BVBA into Inventive Designers NV (comparable to limited liability company) | |
| 1998 | Introduction of EverGreen/400 to allow 5250 non-programmable workstations to act as a full e-mail capable terminal | |
| 1998 | Worldwide distribution of EverGreen/400 by IBM | |
| 2000 | Introduction of DTM for iSeries, capable of converting OfficeVision documents to XML | |
| 2000 | Move to new offices | |
| 2002 | Worldwide distribution of DTM for iSeries by Lotus Software | |
| 2002 | DTM nominated as Apex Award Finalist by iSeries News Magazine | |
| 2002 | Introduction of Scriptura XBOS, one of the first what-you-see-is-what-you-get XSL editors | |
| 2003 | The company receives a Gazelle Certificate from Trends Magazine, one of the leading business magazines in Belgium, in the category 'Fast Growing Small Businesses' | |
| 2003 | The company receives the SpringBOK award for fastest growing and most creative enterprise in the Antwerp region | |
| 2003 | 'Best Performer' for the province of Antwerp at the yearly Flemish export price 'Lion of the export' | |
| 2004 | Release of Scriptura Designer and Scriptura Engine, first steps towards a document composition tool | |
| 2004 | IBM's Watson Research Group invites Inventive Designers to join the XSL Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) | |
| 2005 | Winner of the 'Platinum European Seal of Excellence in Multimedia' at the yearly CeBIT Convention in Hannover, Germany | |
| 2005 | The company receives a Gazelle Certificate from Trends Magazine, one of the leading business magazines in Belgium, in the category 'Fast Growing Medium Businesses' | |
| 2005 | Release of Scriptura XSL Business Output Suite, a platform to compose templates and generate multi-channel output. Introducing electronic forms. | |
| 2006 | Inventive Designers receives an Honorable Mention at the 'Innovator of the Year' award ceremony at the XPlor International Conference in Miami | |
| 2006 | The company joins the AFP Consortium | |
| 2006 | Director Joke Dehond receives XPlor's Electronic Document Professional[1] certification | |
| 2006 | The company wins the AIIM Best Practice Award for Banking and Financial Services at the yearly AIIM Conference in Philadelphia | |
| 2007 | The 'ICT Innovation Award' of Banking and Finance Magazine is awarded to Inventive Designers | |
| 2007 | Release of the Scriptura Post-Processor, enabling grouping, bundling, sorting ... | |
| 2009 | Release of IntelliStamp (patent pending), a hybrid signature to secure electronic and paper documents | |
| 2009 | Inventive Designers is selected for the Benelux short list of Logica's 'Global Innovation Venture Program' contest | |
| 2009 | Release of Scriptura Document Flow, a what-you-see-if-what-you-get interface to design and execute document flows. Replaces the Scriptura Post-Processor | |
| 2009 | Partnership with Xerox for Belgium and Luxemburg | |
| 2010 | Founder Guy Dehond receives the 2010 CIOnet Innovation Award | |
| 2010 | Inventive Designers named as one of nine ambitious companies by Deloitte's Technology Fast50 in Belgium |
Technology
Innovation is the DNA of the company. All products developed by Inventive Designers are characterized by the use of new technologies or new concepts in existing applications.
Scriptura
Scriptura started in 2001 as one of the first software solution to actively use XSL-FO, which (at that time) was still a W3C Recommendation and not yet a standard. The release of the Scriptura Designer in 2001 allowed its users to create XSL-FO templates, based on XML input data. Rather than having to write XSL-FO code, the Scriptura Designer was a what-you-see-is-what-you-get design tool that allowed users to design a template and export it as an XSL-FO template. Over the next years, the Scriptura Designer evolved into a robust, user-friendly tool for designing dynamic XSL-FO templates based on open standards.
In 2003, the Scriptura Server was released and allowed to use the XSL-FO templates from the Scriptura Designer as input format to create output in PDF. There were separate components for batch and online processing. At that time, Inventive Designers was invited by the IBM Watson Research Group to join the W3C XSL Working Group. New output formats were added over the years, like AFP, PDF/A, TIFF, RTF, PS, PCL and many others. In 2005, Scriptura E-Forms was released, to allow users to design and process electronic forms, based on W3C's XForms standard.
Scriptura is based on the separation of content and layout, and the templates that are created with the Scriptura Designer were independent of the final output format. It was the Scriptura Server that did the transformation from XSL-FO into a final output format. That way, one and the same template could be used for every output format. Support for multi-channel output was implemented and customers started asking for for post-processing operations like bundling, sorting, grouping and more. This resulted in the release of the Scriptura Bundler component (2005), which later evolved into the Scriptura PostProcessor (2007).
The PostProcessor was a Java API, so additional programming was needed to implement it. Also, there was a need for better pluggability and a need to cover the entire document process. And since Scriptura wanted to offer the opportunity to be used by non-IT users, a graphical interface was needed. In 2008, the Scriptura DocumentFlow was released, a graphical interface that enabled users to design the whole document process, from data retrieval to output delivery.
Scriptura DocumentFlow serves as the basis for the Scriptura Automated Document Factory, which was released in 2010. The Scriptura Document Flow is based in the ADF 2.0 definition by Gartner, and is able to handle hardware feedback, do tracking and tracing, reporting and and closed loop.
According to a study by Madison Advisors[2] Scriptura has:
- Has a very good platform support (being platform independent)without the need for an application server
- Has a very good solution architecture, based on open standards
- Enables document applications to be fully embedded and branded within corporate applications for transparency
Today, Scriptura is evolved into an output platform to centralize and optimize all customer communciations. The product is used by customers worldwide in on demand, batch or interactive document production.
IntelliStamp
To be included
DTM for iSeries
To be included
EverGreen/400
To be included
Innovation
In the business magazine Ondernemers, founder Guy Dehond stated that the only way that smaller companies can survive, is by being creative and innovative. He compared innovation with a raw material, that is available everywhere and to everyone to pick up and be used. According to Guy Dehond, innovation is independent of industries and is the result of creativity, guts, necessity, knowledge and wilfulness. He described being innovative as being able to convert problems into opportunities. According to an article that was published in connection with the CIOnet Innovation Award [3], Guy Dehond sees himself as a businessman who innovates and he stresses the importance of finding a balance between creativity and management. Inventive Designers supports different government initiatives [4] to promote the necessity to innovate.
Standards
Inventive Designers wants to play an active role in the development and improvement of standards. The company participates in the AFP Consortium [5]and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). At the W3C, Inventive Designers was active in the XSL Working Group for many years. CTO Klaas Bals was editor of the XSL Requirements 2.0 [6] document. Currently, the company plays an active role in W3C's Forms Working Group[7].
Applications
Most common applications implemented by Inventive Designers products:
- Optimization of output processes
- High volume billing for utilities, telecom and other industries
- Multi-lingual documents
- Automated document factory (ADF) and closed loop
- Templates for customer correspondence
- Document security
- Electronic forms
- Interactive documents
- Account and investment statements, client reporting for bank customers
- Insurance policies and claims processing
- Multi-channel publishing