InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
July 5, 1999
 Print this story |
Companies face printing questions as they invest in new apps and seek to control output
By Karen D. Schwartz
One immediate difficulty the company faced related to printing. Reynolds wanted to use J.D. Edwards' ERP system on IBM's AS/400 hardware, but that platform doesn't support printing documents over the network in the software's PDF output format. "PDF isn't a native format for the AS/400, so we had a lot of decisions to make," says Stuart Burnett, senior technical consultant at the Richmond, Va., company. "We had to decide whether it made more sense to move the data to a Windows NT platform because NT understands PDF, or whether we should try to work with a package that was AS/400-resident but would have a more difficult time dealing with the data streams."
Burnett and his team ultimately decided on a somewhat awkward but workable solution that involved the ERP system performing some intricate conversions on the PDF files and then sending them over the network to a printer defined to take advantage of both the AS/400 hardware and the ERP software. "It took some real work," Burnett says. But "adding additional functionality to the ERP base output, which is pretty limited" was the better move for the company.
Companies are facing a variety of printing questions as they invest in new applications, cope with legacy systems, and launch initiatives designed to offer greater control over output. As it turns out, managing output from most vendors' ERP systems is one of the biggest problems because printing is not a core competency of these products, according to John Curtis, service manager for consulting services at Hewlett-Packard. These packages deliver basic output, he says, but more advanced features such as bar codes and guaranteed document delivery aren't provided.
"Printing tends to be overlooked by ERP solutions," Curtis says. In addition to limited output, "companies don't realize that when they are ready to go live, their mission-critical documents--which are now integrated throughout the enterprise--can't always be printed" on targeted networked printers, he says. For example, HP has had one customer who had to reroute paychecks generated using its ERP system to the mainframe so they could be printed the old-fashioned way on production printers--eliminating the benefit of the ERP system's ability to streamline the check-generation process.
That's a problem in an age when companies often aim to get away from generating critical output on high-end, centralized printers, then manually distributing that hard-copy data to users. But generating output from any legacy mainframe or midrange application on printers that reside on client-server networks presents difficulties, says Keith Moody, general manager of applications solutions in printer vendor Lexmark International Inc.'s worldwide marketing group. He says these applications don't handle formats common to heterogeneous and distributed environments.
As print requirements change, the underlying programs and implementation may need revisions says Charlie Corr, director of the on-demand suppliers group at Cap Ventures Inc., a document consulting firm. The fact that legacy data streams generally don't work well in a graphics world dominated by PCL or PostScript formats is often overlooked.
To solve the problem, most major printing vendors and third-parties offer tools that transform the data into formats readable by today's distributed printers. By using middleware tools from companies such as Emtex, HP, Lexmark, and Rochester Software Associates, companies can transform legacy documents into PostScript or PCL formats. Users can then also add printing features--such as color options, new fonts, and the ability to change the location of data on the page--to the legacy applications without having to change the original application.
Related links:
And from our sister publications:
xecutives at Reynolds Metals Co.--the makers of Reynolds Wrap, among other products--decided last summer to implement a global enterprise resource planning system for 18,000 employees nationwide. They knew the implementation would be challenging, but they also knew that it was the right move.
continued...page 2
Back to This Week's Issue
Featured Microsite
