Case study: Industrial Printers

The Challenge

  A publishing company in the Mid-West was facing the challenge of growing its business but was constrained by “outdated” technology. The cost to replace this technology would be over $10,000,000 - an amount that was not available to the company.

  The printing workhorse for the company was a Scitex 3000. These units had one severe limitation - the way that data was loaded into the printers was via nine-track magnetic tapes. The process to create the input tapes was time consuming, prone to errors and was the major constraint to revenue growth.

To create a print job, the company used a set of workstations. Once the job was completed, the workstations transferred the job via LAN to a set of shared hard drives (SAN). Once the job was deposited into the SAN, an IBM mainframe pulled the printing job and then transferred the printing job to magnetic tapes. The tapes (of which there could be up to 30 for a single printing job!) were then physically carried over to the printer location and then loaded onto other tape drives that fed the information to the Scitex printers.

  The major issue with the environment was not the Scitex 3000 printers, but the method in which the printing jobs had to be generated and transferred to these printers. By replacing the tapes drives that fed the Scitex 3000 printers with the DS1000 Magnetic Tape Emulator configured to act as network attached storage devices, the company was able to bypass all of the tape drives and feed the print jobs directly into the DS1000. The DS1000 translated the print jobs into the tape format required by the printers. 

  The benefits to the printing company were immediate. The company was able to eliminate a costly IBM mainframe, get rid of over 30 maintenance intensive tape drives, reduce job processing time by 80% and improve overall system quality by 20% through the elimination of the manually intensive tape creation process. The net result to the company was to reduce its operating costs by over 20% and improving the efficiency of its Scitex printers by over 250%. This allowed the company to handle new jobs at minimal cost, thereby generating additional revenue without major capital investment.