Printing Systems


Printed output is a significant part of many businesses today, yet printers remain perhaps the most under-managed asset in the IT infrastructure. Large enterprises often deploy thousands of distributed output devices and, according to Gartner Group, typically spend 1 to 3% of annual revenue on printed output (Rightsizing Output Fleets: The Hidden Gold Mine, Gartner Research Note, 19 March 2001). As with the other elements of an on demand computing environment, herein lies an opportunity to improve the way a business operates. That's because the same productivity enhancement, utilization, consolidation, and "total cost of ownership" concepts that are applied to the servers and storage infrastructure components are also applicable to the printing component. Companies spend millions of dollars every year on printed output, so improvements in efficiency can produce substantial savings.

While the initial purchase price of printers is always of interest, there are other factors that must be considered that directly affect TCO, including: supplies, up-time/reliability, and longevity. For example, the cost savings in supplies alone when you move from inkjet to laser printers is significant. The cost of inkjet supplies is two to three times greater than that of laser printer supplies (Inkjet Printers Can Cost Firms More Than They Realize", Gartner First Take, July 2002). As with servers and storage, there is also money to be saved through printer consolidation, which often results in less wasted printing resources and thus lower costs. This is especially true in distributed printing environments, where a fleet of printers is shared by users on a network.

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The IBM Printing Systems division offers products ranging from simple desktop printers to large-scale "print on demand" solutions for commercial printing applications. There are printers for workgroups, for industrial environments, for high-volume cut sheet or continuous form printing, and for monochrome or color printing. Figure 3.5 shows some example printers. IBM Printing Systems also offers a range of printing-related software products for all IBM eServer systems. Again, the aim is to reduce the TCO for printing resources. For example, the Infoprint Manager software product provides centralized control of printing resources and autonomic computing functions. You can manage remote printers, receive notification of any printing problems, correct problems, balance printing workloads, etc. To see how Infoprint Manager can be put to work in the real world, consider the experience of Volvo Truck Corporation, who needed a more flexible printing system capable of delivering 40,000 customized technical manuals in 23 languages, "on demand" as the trucks were being built on the manufacturing line. To meet this need, print outsourcing partner Elanders upgraded to an IBM Infoprint 4100 printer and the IBM Infoprint Manager software. By doing so they were able to reduce print production lead times from several weeks to less than five hours. In on demand terms, this resulted in better customer service and an improved ability to rapidly adapt to customer needs through flexible product and process customization.

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Figure 3.5: Representative IBM printers.

Another example of innovative printing software is the Infoprint Server, which adds integration functions to aid in the management and distribution of printed and electronic output. You can transform standard print formats directly into Web content or Portable Document Format (PDF) files for universal e-mail distribution. This is exactly what was done at E.D. Smith & Sons—a well-known Canadian manufacturer of jams and other food products. The company used Infoprint Server to re-engineer its accounts payable application and gain the ability to directly e-mail payment remittance advice (in PDF format) to its suppliers. This began a drive to electronically distribute as many business documents as possible. According to IT Director Beverly R. Russell of E.D. Smith, "Infoprint Server allows us to go to the next level of automation and reduce our distribution costs even further. By adding a few data fields that contain the recipients' e-mail addresses on to some of our master files, like our customer and vendor master, we have been able to transform our existing print/fax processes to automatically distribute these documents via e-mail at zero additional cost and have them delivered almost instantly." These are just two examples of the many printing-related software products available for a variety of eServer systems that businesses can leverage as they evolve towards an on demand operating environment.

Finally, IBM Printing Systems offers a range of printing and output-related consulting services that can help analyze your current situation and then plan and implement a printing infrastructure that enables the efficient creation and flow of printed output. These consulting services focus on finding ways to increase productivity and reduce total output costs by up to 30% according to IBM.




Building an On Demand Computing Environment with IBM. How to Optimize Your Current Infrastructure for Today and Tomorrow
Building an On Demand Computing Environment with IBM: How to Optimize Your Current Infrastructure for Today and Tomorrow (MaxFacts Guidebook series)
ISBN: 193164411X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 20
Authors: Jim Hoskins

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