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Impact or Laser?

I had a great visit today with the InfoPrint call center staff in Austin. There was discussion about customers being convinced to move away from impact printers and toward laser printing. This is typically by people prejudiced against impact, or those that are only selling lasers. It reminded me of my write-up on the subject, found on my website. Here it is for your convenience:

Use IBM InfoPrint Impact Printers
or Migrate to Laser Printers?

If your old impact printers are not becoming to you -

you should be
coming to us!

Covered Below:

Issue Examination

Marketplace Facts

Are we Impact-Biased?

Options are Available

Are Any of These Silly Issues True?

Have CUSTOMERS STOPPED TAKING SHIPMENTS because the documents are in dot matrix output?

Will no A/P clerk PAY YOUR INVOICE due to the fact that your company uses an older style of printing?

Are vendor salesreps, ISV advisors, consultants and staff telling you to move to LASER PRINTERS?

Are you ready to SPEND MORE MONEY?

Ready to be LESS ECONOMICAL?

Is there NO OTHER WAY to make the printout work better?

Want to SPEND 10X TO 20X ON PRINTING SUPPLIES?

Then by all means, MOVE TO LASER PRINTING!

Impact Printer Facts

Pretty much every laser printer rep has no impact offering (or even any personal experience) with a high volume mission-critical business-level impact printer.

Just think about it .... Ricoh? HP? Xerox? Lexmark? Konica/Minolta? Brother?

None of them sell impact line printers.

Only Lexmark have anything with a ribbon in it, and theirs are serial printers for light transactional duty only.

Do any of them sell thermal barcode printers. Nope. Not a one.

Are you taking your printing advice from reps and company staff that can't remember a world without web browsers and pocket cell phones? What do they really know about impact printers anyway?

So We Try to Keep You on Impact?

No, not at all! We think laser printed output is great. For years, we have helped customers make that move and enhance their print.

We think impact is great too, and can be made modern and even more cost-effective that it is today.

You know how many doctors and chiropractors bad-mouth each other? One value we have for you - we can diagnose, devise a remedy, and write a prescription without an entire printer transplant. We do not have a built-in bias AGAINST impact printers, OR FOR impact printers. We love 'em both, but we especially love showing customers how to transact their business at the lowest costs - it wins us long-term customers, and we feel those are the best kind.

How Can GLM Help Me Affordably?

We call it "Print Less and Print Better". Why move only to laser? Maybe you could move to less printing.

Let us help you leave the three-part-forms behind. Is the "pink" copy simply headed to a filing cabinet? Put it there electronically. Could the customer choose to receive the bill in an email? We do, and we are in the printer business!

One of our suppliers switched to e-distribution, and their invoice printing dropped by 75%. We can provide the same software and consulting solution to make that happen for you.

Some output is absolutely better on laser! Bringing photo half-tone images, tight logo graphics, and small barcodes on your printing are all reasons to move to laser. If you merely want to move away from pre-printed forms, we can likely design the form and the data onto your old or new impact printers and keep the expenses low.

Maybe you have a workflow issue with your printing. Do you generate invoices with one job and picking slips with a separate job and printer, and then have experience errors and rework when you try match them to pick and pack the box? We can help you consolidate that effort, with no change to your application programming.

Is Impact bad?

No.

Is Laser always better.

No.

Are you stuck with the output you have because it is too complex to change the programs?

No, not at all.

Switch a Line Printer to a Fast Serial Model?

How is the Infoprint 4247-Z03 like a Southwest Airlines plane?
They are both 737's!

The Z03 at 1100 Characters Per Second (CPS) equates to 737 LINES PER MINUTE. Impact print users can consider the Z03 as an affordable alternative to a 500 LPM InfoPrint 6500, or a new upgrade from the older IBM 6400 line printers.

It's 40% less money than an InfoPrint 6500 LPM Line Printer, 30% lower for maintenance service (even less with 9x5 coverage, unavailable on InfoPrint line printers), can sit on a table or desk, and it's nearly 50% faster!

Pictures and details are available here - my website.

How Companies Are Focusing On Printing Less

From Madison Advisors’ Industry Defining Print Suppression Market Study, by Kemal Carr; found on DocumentMedia.com

http://documentmedia.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=Articles+%26+Archives&type=Publishing&mod=Publications::Article&mid=8F3A7027421841978F18BE895F87F791&tier=4&id=2E1BF301C56C4454AFEA260F895DAB59
Madison Advisors surveyed 27 Fortune 500 firms to understand their print suppression strategies. While the majority of firms surveyed identified print suppression as a focus area, they lack the ownership of a C-level executive. Only 14% of them answered that a Chief was looking at e-delivery and printing less. In those large companies, 63% responded that they had budgeted specifically to paperless or e-delivery initiatives.

"Organizations need fully developed stategies with executive support, metrics for measuring success and the right practices in place" to shift to paperless communications. Without them, "customers ofter revert back to paper once the initial thrust has passed."

Even if your company has not made it into Fortune's big list, what are your plans? Do you have the tools in place to enhance, electrify, and e-warehouse your customer and internal communications?

InfoPrint Wins ON DEMAND Best of Show Honorable Mention Award

InfoPrint press release

InfoPrint TransPromo Whitespace Manager Recognized as Powerful Tool Combining Company's AFP and Production Workflow Leadership

PHILADELPHIA, PA, Apr 20, 2010 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) -- InfoPrint Solutions Company, a joint venture between IBM and Ricoh, has been recognized at this year's ON DEMAND Conference & Exposition with a Best of Show Honorable Mention award in the 1:1 Communications category for its TransPromo Whitespace Manager solution. InfoPrint TransPromo Whitespace Manager won an honorable mention as a compact, flexible and cost-effective solution that enables users to easily enhance unused space on a document with rules-based, relevant messaging, leveraging InfoPrint's AFP and production workflow leadership.

InfoTrends, a leading market research and consulting firm in the digital imaging and document solutions industry, partnered with the ON DEMAND Conference & Exposition to produce the awards program. ON DEMAND, the digital printing & automated production event, is the largest conference and exposition dedicated to the technologies that personalize, manage, print, and deliver content.

InfoPrint Whitespace Manager can manage whitespace on an AFP file in two ways: either through a user-assigned space or space found in a search. Once this space is found, a convenient rules builder allows the user to add messaging, based on information that can be found in the document -- such as address, account type or balance information. InfoPrint TransPromo Whitespace Manager is available as a standalone product, or can be integrated with InfoPrint's leading ADF Workflow solution, based on InfoPrint ProcessDirector (IPPD). This allows a set of rules to be established once, and to be repeated every time the job is run again in the future.

"We are delighted to receive this prestigious commendation. InfoPrint has already showcased our leadership in the Precision Marketing, TransPromo, and Workflow spaces. With this tool, we enable marketers, direct mailers, data centers and service bureaus to provide added value to their communications without going through the expense of document re-engineering," said Don Dew, ADF Solutions Manager at InfoPrint.

"This award is meant to recognize exceptional innovation in the digital printing industry," stated Jeff Hayes, President, InfoTrends. "InfoPrint is one of the leaders in our industry, and we are pleased to acknowledge their accomplishments."

Would you rather have prints or e-docs?

Don Dew, ADF Solutions Manager at InfoPrint wrote in the InfoPrint ADF Savings blog:

I returned home from work last night to find a letter from the State of New York, where I lived 3 years ago, stating I was “selected for review for possible audit.” Yay. Now I need to dig out old returns, brokerage statements, info about the house we sold, and most likely jump through hoops to see if I can prove to them why they should get another couple of bucks out of me.

That’s a lot of personal info. With spyware, keyloggers, viruses, and hackers – why would I want that on my computer? It screams “steal my identity”! An alternative is to save everything to a secure USB drive, and access it independent of the Internet when you want to file or review highly sensitive personal information.

I work in an IT world for a living. The last thing I want to do when I get home is be "Director of MIS" at the house. How well are all my systems backed up, firewalls, virus scanners, redundant systems, photos, purchased iTunes safe (and on and on)?

Sure. Makes sense. Simply put it on a USB thumbdrive and save it. And don't misplace it. And don't let the kids use it for that oh-so-critical file that just-has-to-be-moved right now.

Anyone still have VHS tapes around? Did you ever tape over them for another show? Do you have them all labeled and cataloged and easy to find? Did you capture miles of presents being opened on the kid's tapes, and why do we ever tape what was in the presents?

How easy is it now to find important 'things', and how are you going to manage the really important e-files that much better?

If I handle my bank and investment documents like my iTunes and photos, I'm in trouble.

Convert Microsoft Templates and Files with MAPPING Suite

Roanoke, Texas - March 16, 2010

Many companies took advantage of the familiarity and ease of Microsoft Word or Excel to develop productivity tools. Unfortunately, those tools have accumulated for years and the company is captive to its function and its output. The task to update these files becomes daunting as one became ten, and ten became dozens and dozens of files.

When changes in business call for an update to those files, how do you find the time and the budget to make it happen? When an improved process can help, where do you look for help with all those templates, documents, and spreadsheets?

Microsoft created XPS (XML Paper Specifications) as its basis for output support going forward from Vista and Office 2007. Microsoft also published the standards as Open Source and urged ISVs to explore its values. MAPPING Suite has fully embraced the strengths of XPS, and has re-written the entire engine of MAPPING by using these standards.

You can take your file “AS-IS” with MAPPING. You determine the changes, math, database calls, output looks, and distribution paths (e-files and/or print) on our WYSIWYG tool, save it for execution, and you are DONE.

For more information, Click HERE for a description of MAPPING V7 with XPS, call 817-430-6202 or contact Warren Neeley at wneeley@pciprinters.com.