Keeping An Eye on the "Kids"!
Remember the public service announcement that used to flash across your TV screen at 10:00 or 11:00 PM each night that asked the question: "Do you know where your children are tonight?" This simple question would elicit potentially three responses from parents:

1. A comfortable feeling that the kids were safe and sound in their bedrooms
2. Unconcern on the part of parents who have already lost control of their kids
3. Sheer terror on the part of clueless parents

When this type of question is raised with regards to Print / Finish jobs in a document manufacturing center, the same three responses can also be expected. There are those shops that are confident that all jobs are progressing as expected. There are other shops that could really care less because they view the print / finish process as a necessary evil of doing business and don’t view themselves as a profit and loss center. They could care less because they have already lost control of what goes on in the shop. The last response is one of sheer terror on the part of the print / finish manager. The terror exists because the manager is relatively clueless and has no idea what is going on in the shop.

These three types of print / finish shops exist in today’s document manufacturing environment. Print / finish shops of years past were viewed as a cost centers whose primary concern was to "get the mail out". They functioned with the resources they had built up over several years. Jobs sometimes get lost, duplicated, or never show up to begin with. Managers of these shops react to the situation and quickly try to apply a remedy. Their performance was measured on the amount of complaints that they would or would not receive from their customers.

Now print / finish shops are being measured as profit and loss centers. They have negotiated Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with their customers. In some cases financial penalties are assessed for missed SLAs. Their success is measured on their ability to deliver within existing SLA contracts. In other cases the print / finish center is rewarded on consistent SLA compliance.

Tracking the Work
In the past, tracking methods for the print / finish shop included: none, manual log entries, spreadsheets, memos written on white boards, and thoughts stored in the memory of long time employees. The problem with these methods is that they are not consistent and are subject to human error. Some of these methods are more accurate than others, but most do not allow other departments or business unit owners to monitor the work when it is in progress. When a progress report was needed, the business unit owner would place a phone call to the print / finish center to inquire about their jobs. The print / finish operations staff would then take a guess at when a job might be finished, or how long it will be running and relay the "guess" to the business unit owner. This best guess effort was acceptable in years past, but no longer cuts it in the world of SLAs.

Controlling the "Kids"
Just as with children, the Print / Finish Manager must regain control of the jobs in the shop. This process begins with job tracking. The first step is measurement. You cannot begin to understand what is going on if you don’t collect information and measure how things are going. When measurements have been taken, an analysis of the data can begin to pave the way for control and understanding of the print / finish environment.

The introduction of networking and the Internet now provide the conduit for the transmission of information about these jobs to a central site. Once the job data has been aggregated, remotely located users can view the status of their jobs, and generate performance reports. Print / Finish Managers have an accurate method of measuring work and creating SLAs that both they and their customers can live with. Information that was once left isolated in the department that performed the work can now be shared across an enterprise, or all over the world.

Setting Service Level Agreements
Having collected the data on the performance of the shop, you now have the information required to set service level agreements. Here is an example of data you may have collected in the first phase of Job Tracking implementation:

Job Name	Job Type	Start Time	End Time	Volume	Units
AR600	Print	08:26	14:34	400,000	Pages

In the example above we see that a print job with the name AR600 started at 8:26 AM and was complete at 2:34 PM (14:34) PM and had a volume of 400,000 pages. This is a great start for creating a Service Level for this job; or is it? Do we know if this job runs daily, weekly, monthly, or many times in a day? Is this print Job part of a larger job with a name such as INVOICES? What are the other steps required to get the "mail out"?

Let us expand the above example to create a workflow that can be tracked and measured against an SLA.

The chart above has many aspects of tracking work to create a workable SLA for the profile called INVOICES. Let’s look at them one at a time to see what is going on. The overview of INVOICES shows that it is comprised of three work steps (1. AR600, 2. ARI600, 3. ARS600).

1. AR600 – is the first work step to be processed. It is the print work step. It is expected to arrive at 8:15, but actually shows up at 8:26. Is this a problem? We can see from the early / late threshold that we have a 20 minute + - window for the arrival so we are OK here. What about the expected versus actual volume? We are expecting 350,000 pages, but have received 400,000. This could be the reason the job arrived a few minutes late, and also could spell trouble for subsequent processes.
   
2. ARI600 – is the second step. It is an Insert step. It too has begun later than expected (by only 15 minutes), and is 20,000 pieces larger than expected. Notice that the ratio of pages printed does not correlate to the number of pieces created during the insert step. This is due to the fact that multi-page documents were created and consolidated into single envelopes. Also notice the + - threshold for arrival. We are well within our window of processing, and the 20,000-piece overage shouldn’t cause problems.
   
3. ARS600 – is the third step. This is the sort step. It looks as if we are slightly ahead of schedule based on the actual arrival time of the sort work.
   What can be concluded from this tracking activity is the behavior of work steps to create the final package. This example included traditional Print / Finish work steps. The tracking process can include non-traditional work steps such as application processing on the computer. Wouldn’t it be great to know how far along the application is that will create your print file? This information can provide an element of planning that previously didn’t exist. How about tracking the metal cages that the mail trays are stacked in as they arrive at the airport? This "work step" can be tracked as well!

Expand Your Tracking
Any process that runs on a computing system that is attached to a network can be tracked. This type of thought process begins to open doors for a full-blown process tracking system. The figure below shows an expanded tracking system:

Any work step in the process can be tracked. As long as the basic concept of a "job" can be defined, the rest is a matter of collection.

Apples, Oranges, Watermelons
Another concept that should be discussed is the tracking of unlike units. Using the example in figure 1, the units tracked by applications could be bytes, lines or pages of output, or some other unit. The same units may or may not be counted at the print spool. Once the print work step occurs, the counting may switch to strictly pages, or linear footage. At the insert work step the units might be pieces. Trays are a unit within themselves as are cages. To track this work that is the combination of all work steps we must count the units for the individual work steps and then roll them up to the profile level. Here is an example:

INVOICES

APPLICATION 2,000,000,000 BYTES
SPOOL 700,000 RECORDS
PRINT 400,000 PAGES
INSERT 220,000 PIECES
SORT 52 MAIL TRAYS
STAGE 12 MAIL CAGES

In this example we see that we are tracking different units on behalf of the larger product known as invoices. Tracking must be done at the work step level, and not forced upon the level known as INVOICES, otherwise we would have to try and find a common unit to count. This can be an almost impossible task in most cases. Just as you cannot compare apples, to oranges, to watermelons.

Watching the "Kids" From the Web
Parents today can "watch" their kids by way of the Internet at daycare centers. Watching teenagers is a more difficult task, but it can be done. To watch a teenager it would require that the teen wear a video camera, attached to a computer, connected to the Internet by way of a cell phone modem. This is not a practical approach.

In the Print / Finish world, this is not such a ridiculous proposal. Most processing in the environment runs on computers that are attached to networks. With this being said it is just a matter of collecting the data, and sending it to a central repository for the appropriate analysis and report generation. TCP/IP and the Internet allow users to easily retrieve this information from just about anywhere in the world. With this type of infrastructure we truly can know where our Print / Finish jobs are.

Build It and You Can Track
Here in lies the tough question. Do you spend the time and money building this system your self, or do you go on the search for a solution provided by a vendor? Surely your shop is different than all others in that nobody processes work in quite the same way you do. Your mix of equipment is different from others as well. Whether you build or buy this solution you must keep in mind that it must be vendor-neutral and can provide you with the data collection capability you need to begin analyzing and managing your shop.

Where Is The Return On My Investment?
Here is a line of thought you might want to use to test your knowledge of your own shop:

1. You don’t know how you are doing unless you measure
2. Once you have measured you need tools to help you make sense of the data
3. The cost of inefficient processing can be determined once you have measured your processes
4. What is the cost of consistently missed Service Level Agreements?
5. What is the cost of a customer lost?
6. What is the value of satisfied, referable customers?

Bringing the "Kids" Back Home
Now that you have collected the data, measured the performance, and made changes to the way you do your processing, you can begin to manage your shop more effectively. You will be able to plan your work and be able to react intelligently to situations when they arise. When asked you will definitely know where your Print / Finish jobs are tonight!

John Lynch is Director of Software Development for Pitney Bowes docSense. He is responsible for developing and integrating software encompassing print stream management, control and reporting, and data quality/fraud detection. Mr. Lynch has more than 15 years of technical and software development experience. Most recently he served as Technical Leader for the Document Factory Solutions group of Pitney Bowes, and before that was Director of Product Development for StreamWeaver print stream engineering software.

Return to List of Articles