Mainframe printing on office MFPs

The Challenge

Volvo Truck Centre has facilities around Denmark with a large requirement for printing service orders, spare part lists and invoices for the individual service centres. The central system for data processing is managed by an IBM iSeries operated and placed at Volvo Corporation's IT centre in Sweden.

A large number of different documents are required to be printed on different paper stock - e.g. invoices on letter head paper, work sheets used in the garage (require heavy stock paper to withstand the daily wear in the garage area) and normal weight paper for general use as well as different stock. This requires printers utilising several input trays.

The Solution

As the print volume increased together with the fact that the old printers were getting too expensive to maintain, Volvo Truck Centre decided to invest in new printers for all Service Centres. Volvo Truck Centre opted for Ricoh range to match their current and future printing requirements.

The new printers were MFP based and had many more features than the previous brand used. It was of ultimate importance to Volvo Truck Centre that all the facilities of the old printers could be matched to the Ricoh printers without any changes to the set up or to the applications running on the iSeries system. MPI Tech could meet all requirements using the LinkCom box.

MPI Tech could meet all requirements using the LinkCom box, and no changes were needed to the existing printer definitions on the iSeries system

All the old paper tray definitions were programmed within the box to match those of the Ricoh solution. No changes were needed to the existing printer definitions on the iSeries system.

The Benefits

Volvo Truck Centre made use of the LinkCom feature to 'Output to network Facility' (Host2Net), thus enabling the box to be placed in the local server room, simplifying the busy service area and customer environment.