InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
July 5, 1999
 Print this story |
continued...page 2 of 2
"Something was going to have to change, and it sure wasn't going to be the J.D. Edwards system." Reynolds retained a team from Lexmark Solution Services, the services arm of Lexmark International, to evaluate electronic-forms packages that can support its ERP system and AS/400 environment. Reynolds chose Optio, from the company of the same name, to run on an NT box; it will intercept the PDF files out of the J.D. Edwards software, map the data to variables that can be placed anywhere on the page in any format, and output to Lexmark Optra S class laser printers using PCL or PostScript formats.
Reynolds says the company should be able to fax the same form, either through its NT fax server product, Bizcomm, or through an Optio add-on, or send it to its archival-retrieval system for review over the intranet by anyone in the company--saving on printing costs.
Other companies are also choosing to reduce printing costs and gain efficiencies and flexibility by taking advantage of the Internet. That includes insurance giant USAA, where Chris Courtright, IT applications manager, is now prototyping a system that has the potential to expand to the entire 22,000-employee company. The project involves collapsing all printing functions for insurance, credit-card billing, policy issuing, and other vertical applications into one system, using a new document-assembly engine, the Documentum document-management system, and HP's Dazel Output Server distribution and presentation system.
"We took the approach that we should create the documents and then `wrap' metadata around the documents that describe how they needed to be produced," Courtright says. This let the company archive the documents in the document-management system so any application can pick them up and seamlessly render them to browser screen, E-mail, fax, or paper. "The same document can be printed and stapled as well as displayed on a screen and the stapling instructions ignored for the screen formatting," he says.
The ability to put the same document on the Web or send it via E-mail or fax can save on postage costs, a significant savings for a company that now processes 420,000 pieces of outgoing mail each day. And the fewer documents printed--whether internally or for external use--the fewer extra printer maintenance charges USAA has to pay, Courtright says. That's a wise way of doing business, according to HP's Curtis. "The longer companies can keep information in digital form, the more time and money they save," he says.
The world is really heterogeneous--not paper or digital, adds Kevin McPherson, global marketing manager in Xerox Corp.'s production systems group. Companies receive payback by reducing the printing of internal reports and making them accessible on intranets. That's been true for Owens Corning, the Toledo, Ohio, manufacturer of glass fiberization technology. It also chose to port some of its output to a Web environment. Owens Corning now uses the Web to provide sales reports to its sales force more efficiently, and it puts invoices on the Web for customers to review, says David Johns, VP and CIO at the company. The company has been able to reduce its print output significantly. Users can print what they need on demand, rather than sift through irrelevant documents.
No printing challenge is insurmountable, industry experts say. The key is to know your printing environment and take advantage of outsourcing services when that environment may be too complicated even for the company's IT staff to understand fully (see sidebar story, "Outsourcing Gains Steam"). Says McPherson, "There are a lot of printing-related challenges a company can encounter these days. The goal is identifying and prioritizing those challenges."
Gaining Opportunities
Related links:
And from our sister publications:
For Reynolds Metal, adopting the ERP system caused real output problems--but also created new opportunity. "What we didn't realize at first is that moving to the ERP system would enable us to solve many printing-related problems we have had for quite some time," Burnett says. For instance, Reynolds had wanted to move away from preprinted forms to electronic forms that could be delivered on the fly, but couldn't justify the expense before its ERP implementation. That changed when it became clear that the raw data from the ERP system wasn't going to match the preprinted forms, Burnett says.
return to page 1
Back to This Week's Issue
Featured Microsite
