March 11, 2002 -- Exstream Software, Inc. announced today that AFLAC, a leading provider of insurance at the worksite in the U.S. and the largest foreign insurer in Japan, has adopted Dialogue as its software of choice for producing up to 80 percent of their worldwide business communications. Producing millions of digitally created documents each year, AFLAC needed a high-performance software solution capable of efficiently managing multiple changes on individual documents, while at the same time improving time to market and output performance. AFLAC found Dialogue to be the only software on the market that had the ease-of-use, flexibility, performance and speed it needed to improve efficiencies in their high-volume variable document environment. Instrumental in AFLAC's choice was Dialogue's component library, which allows users to store commonly used objects—like tables, text boxes, business rules and images—for reuse in multiple applications. Components only have to be changed in one place for automatic update in all applications in which they appear, and full version control and approval workflow are maintained for each library component. This allows AFLAC to significantly reduce the thousands of forms they used with their previous software. Other significant drivers in AFLAC's choice were Dialogue's ability to create TIFF output for their document archival system, as well as the advanced document composition capabilities in Dialogue, which will eventually eliminate the many external programs AFLAC maintains to ensure document compliancy across the many different insurance product lines they offer in 50 states. "Dialogue met all of our immediate needs and many of our future requirements as well," said Luanne Gentry, Technical Project Consultant. "It even exceeded our performance requirements for creating and maintaining applications, while at the same time generating output faster. With Dialogue, we no longer have to manually make changes throughout documents, which significantly increases our productivity and reduces errors." AFLAC plans to take advantage of Dialogue's variety of output formats so they can deliver electronic documents to customers through email and the Web, as well as through print/mail using their current Xerox Metacode environment. They also plan to benefit from Dialogue's comprehensive campaign management capabilities, which allow them to dynamically integrate targeted messages and campaigns into each customer communication at run time (without programming). Dialogue also tracks all document activity in its Knowledgebase—including customer responses to campaigns (or lack of them)—to ensure future communications sent to customers are timely and relevant. "Providing innovators like AFLAC the total software solution they need to meet their document creation, management and delivery requirements is very exciting to say the least," said Davis Marksbury, president and CEO of Exstream Software. "Dialogue's ease of use and robust functionality simplifies AFLAC's document processes, allowing them to focus more on growth than on routine details that are easily automated with Dialogue." In the near future, AFLAC plans to implement Dialogue in other departments so it can maximize benefits across the entire company.