More Success with Assisting Industry Transitioning to C21 Technology
We have been busy during December assisting two different industrial companies, who were still heavily reliant on struggling dot matrix printers.
Food Container Industry
This customer needed reports from its injection moulding machines – some of which would produce reports of about 80 pages long each day. Whilst the printed reports have traditionally been kept and scanned in, for audit purposes, they sought a solution to improve the quality of the reporting and save on valuable time spent scanning in the reports.
The Retro-Printer came to their aid – we made a couple of changes to the software, so that one large PDF could be created of the 70-80 pages, and accessed over the network for electronic storage without the need to print off the reports each day. During a site visit we also noticed that the output speed of the injection moulding machines was slow in comparison to normal centronics port printing. This allowed us to identify that we could trigger the conversion process in the background whilst still capturing incoming data, without any impact on the capture process.
This resulted in faster conversion of the multi-page report and left the customer happy with the time and paper saved.
Food Blending Industry
This customer runs three production lines, mixing flour, sugar and other ingredients from large hoppers – the ingredients are weighed before being mixed and audit reports maintained of the expected weight of each ingredient, compared to the actual weight.
The aging dot matrix printer was now in such a state that it needed replacement as the printouts were nearly illegible, so the customer’s process engineers worked with us on developing a new functional design specification for each line.
This meant that a QR code would be generated for each production batch to allow easier matching of the reports with the batch number. We amended our code to read the QR Code and embed that into the filename for the generated PDF file. We then embedded a QR code to the end of each PDF file which could also be scanned to give the batch number.
Again, this precludes the need for printed reports for each batch, and by adding the Retro-Printers to their network, the Company could easily import and store the generated PDF files for future audit purposes.
