The customer associated with this case study is a large, multi-national manufacturer of product branding and labeling systems, inventory tracking systems, retail control systems and pricing control systems. The customer is a $600 million plus company that services over 250,000 customers worldwide.
Business Problem - The customer had completed the migration from legacy mainframe applications to one of the largest Oracle 11i Applications implementations known at that time. Their application servers (hosted remotely by IBM Global Services) run the Oracle E-Business Suite including the Financials, HR, Supply Chain, Manufacturing, Procurement, Sales and Order Management modules. After the migration, they continued to have a very labor-intensive tech support problem related to supporting the print spooler software from Plus Technologies. They chose to implement the base OM Plus server module, the OM Plus Java GUI User Interface for their administrators/help desk and the OM Plus HTML User Interface for the end-users who want to check the status and control their print jobs. OM Plus provides advanced delivery and control of documents across complex networks to multiple destination types including printers, fax, email, and web/intranet sites.
OM Plus was installed on the customer's Oracle database server to manage and control all of the print/output across the enterprise. OM Plus replaced the native print spooling system in the Oracle/AIX environment. Print Jobs are now "captured" by OM Plus and delivered to the appropriate device, fax system or email system. No modifications were required to either the Oracle Applications or the AIX operating environment. The users just print as they normally do within Oracle, and OM Plus does the rest. Security is enhanced because end-users can access their print jobs without "root" access and can look at any print job they are authorized to see from any PC using their browser. Administrators have a single, easy-to-use tool to solve printing and fax delivery issues in their new environment saving many help desk man-hours each week. Utilizing functionality built into OM Plus, users can also now select Fax as a destination and "print" their job directly to a fax server. No more print and then fax redundancy.
System Administrators see their whole print operation through the centralized administration function of OM Plus providing tremendous efficiency and major cost control. In addition, end-users can utilize the OM Plus HTML Interface to view, manage and control their own print jobs without adding any additional client software on their PC's. They access OM Plus from their browser.
Implementation - Installing, configuring, and testing were completed in under a week. The customer installed the OM Plus system without any formal training. A Plus Technologies engineer worked remotely via phone to assist the customer with the installation of the OM Plus software and to provide configuration assistance. This level of phone-based service is standard and included without additional charge in all purchases of Plus Technologies print management software.
Results - Utilizing OM Plus allows the customer's system administrators to centrally manage their print/output to over 500 printers and multi-function devices of various makes and models and their fax and email systems across the entire enterprise. System Administrators see their whole print operation through the centralized administration function of OM Plus providing tremendous efficiency and control. They can access all the features of the system designed to help them control and manage their output to printers, fax or email including re-routing, re-printing, audit, accounting and many other functions. The end-users can resolve many of their print related problems on their own through the use of OM Plus without having to add any client software on their PC. Finally, OM Plus was seamlessly integrated into the customer's fully redundant, fail-over server configuration without requiring additional technical resources.
The end result for this customer was that the implementation of OM Plus streamlined their operations and reduced the costs related to the administration and support of the output generated by their Oracle 11i Applications, thereby, improving end-user satisfaction and customer service levels across the enterprise.
Customer Quote - "We can now provide a much higher level of customer service because our end-users are able to manage and control their own output. Our company is so satisfied with the OM Plus advanced print spooler software that we have started selling it to our own customers."
Plus Technologies Case Studies - The Plus Technologies case study series includes real examples of how companies use Advanced Print Spooling Solutions to streamline operations, reduce cost and/or add functionality to existing business processes. For more information on these case studies, contact Plus Technologies.
