500% increase in speed for Common App's application processing

Common App is a nonprofit organization serving over million college applicants each year. Their member colleges and universities rely on the speed and accuracy of PDF processing to generate applications efficiently and reach their enrollment goals.  Common App used iText to process applications efficiently and to reduce cost and resource requirement. 

Each year, Common App undergoes a time-consuming process to collect and submit over a million college applications to their member colleges and universities. In order to save cost and money, Common App needed a scalable and speedy solution to meet such challenge.

With a growing increase of college applications, Common App needed a solution to expedite and simplify application PDF delivery. 

The goals for the solution were:

• Provide fast and accurate PDF delivery

• Need to be easily integrated in existing IT infrastructure 

• Need to be scalable and must incorporate efficient usage of available resources 

It took only 3 months to fully implement the solution and to bring Common App's team up to speed. 

• Increased Speed – every submitted application (with recommendation forms, transcripts and all supporting documents) were printed to PDF overnight using a scheduled batch process, all member colleges received documents promptly. 

• Scalability – iText provided scalability for Common App to only use a handful of serves dedicated to PDF printing. Thus the same computing power can now be used to drive more processes. 

iText solution increased Common App's PDF creation and processing speed from 100% up to, in some cases, 500%. It is estimated that iText helped save $25,000 each year.