Workload Balancing

The Challenge: Too Many Printer Silos, Too Few Bridges

See if you can recognize your problems in the list below:

You’re running a high-volume, mission critical printing operation involving complex documents. You are expected to give customers more for less, while tracking data integrity and asset utilization and meeting deadlines. And that’s just the beginning

Your ability to optimize the use of your capacity is critical. You have to ensure that no printers are idle and that there are no bottlenecks

You are in a multi-vendor printing environment, which means that words such as connectivity, compatibility and flexibility are never far from the front of your mind

Multi-architecture is another familiar and worrisome word. Your high-speed printers may come in different flavors: you may have Xerox, AFP and PostScript printers. You have problems with print job formats, handling print resources and the printer communication protocols

If you run a multi-site operation, the above issues only multiply as physical distribution may become a concern. When you want to print a file at a different location, you need to get the necessary resources to the printers or servers at that location before you can print

If you recognize yourself in the above description, PRO Suite of products has the solutions you need!

The Solution: Any to Any Print Format Conversion

The CrawfordTech’s PRO Suite of products ensures that print jobs are efficiently distributed across all available printers, regardless of:

Printer architecture

Original printer assignments

Original print application types

CrawfordTech solutions provide:

Full printer assignment flexibility

Any to any, on the fly, conversion of print stream formats

Concatenation of any number of print files from many sources into a single large file

An efficient and convenient re-routing tool, PRO Transform Manager

Cost and time savings: there is no need to make expensive changes to the print applications or modify printers’ physical setup

Provide Foolproof Resource Management

CrawfordTech solutions provide foolproof, automatic management of all print resources: the right resources will be delivered to the right printer just when they are needed, as part of the print file.

Convert from Any to Any Print Format

CrawfordTech print stream transforms, unsurpassed in the industry, provide any to any, on the fly, conversion of all major print stream formats, including: AFP, Xerox LCDS and Metacode, PCL, Postscript, PDF, TIFF and line print data CrawfordTech PRO transforms deliver total flexibility, allowing clients to balance their workload dynamically by:

Simply running the print file through the appropriate PRO transform to convert, on the fly, print commands and resources into the target printer's format

Easily re-routing jobs originally destined for one type of printer to another type of printer, optimal for the job

Not only does it improve the use of printing capacity, it also allows organizations to maximize their investments in print technology, and enhances the value of existing printers by enabling them to accommodate output in additional print stream formats.

Select, Sequence and Concatenate Multiple Files

To achieve economies of scale in printing, inserting or archiving, you may need to accumulate a large number of single documents derived from various sources into a large multi-document print file. Our PRO Concatenator product can do that for you. In addition, you can specify which pages are to be pulled from each file and the sequence they should be placed in.

Use PRO Transform Manager – a Versatile Print Traffic Controller

Our PRO Workflow Suite provides PRO Transform Manager that controls the conversion processes and the routing of output documents. The PRO Transform Manager:

Automates the workflow, queuing files to conversion processes and sending converted files to appropriate printers, directories or ftp sites for immediate access worldwide.

Provides concatenation queues to allow multiple files to be concatenated using the PRO Concatenator.

Supports multiple input print file formats, target formats, printers and environments where there are different execution parameters required for different applications, as well as other special integration requirements.

Is a multi-threading system, which can process any number of processes concurrently. This makes it scalable from small to large environments.

Delivers the type of workload balancing that permits clients to concurrently network their print and data delivery applications.

Users of CrawfordTech workload balancing solutions include service bureaus, major financial institutions and many high volume production, print and mail service providers.