Centralized printing processes

The Austrian automotive supplier Hirschmann had set itself the goal of managing all its foreign locations from the IT department at its headquarters in Rankweil (Vorarlberg).

The reason is the central SAP system to which all production sites are connected and via which all shipping, production and purchasing papers are printed.

Hirschmann Automotive has been working in the automotive industry for over 50 years.

With 4,900 employees at six locations worldwide, the Automotive business unit produces products such as connector, contacting and sensor systems as well as special cable solutions and plastic overmolding technologies, which are developed in research collaborations with renowned vehicle manufacturers and tested in the company's own test laboratory.

For simple tasks, employees at overseas sites should be assigned limited rights to manage printers locally, such as redirecting print jobs to other target printers at short notice.

Printing from the SAP system should be done directly to the printers without having to run through additional print servers in order to increase the transparency of the print paths and thereby eliminate possible sources of error.

With these measures, Hirschmann Automotive wanted to halve downtime for troubleshooting and instabilities. The goal was a simple, stable solution that works reliably and is fail-safe.

The UniSpool and PrinTaurus solutions already in use could be easily adapted to future requirements as part of this restructuring.

UniSpool - a print management system for heterogeneous networks with its own spooler - already proved its suitability for use in previous years and was optimally extended with the PrinTaurus management interface for SAP printing.

Printing via WAN connections to the foreign sites was originally the trigger for using AKI's software: Absolute stability, reliability and performance characterized the solution.

In just a few minutes, the printing environment of the sites is mapped centrally from Rankweil in the UniSpool - a time advantage of about 70 percent for the IT department.

The printer models used are limited to standard models from only two manufacturers, which drastically simplifies management and reduces printer maintenance costs by about two-thirds.

The printers meet the requirements for PostScript and network capability.

All documents for HR, finance, purchasing, shipping and production papers are printed from the central SAP system via the UniSpool output management system directly to the target printers at the sites, worldwide, without additional printing paths.

This led to more transparency in the traceability of documents and reduced unnecessary sources of error.

In addition, the device status of the target printers is visible in UniSpool at all times, which prevents problems during printing.

Precise logging from UniSpool of the printing processes enables accurate verification. In this way, sources of error could be reduced by printing directly from SAP to the target printers.

Logging the printing processes makes them transparent and traceable. With a uniform and standardized printing environment at all sites, those responsible at Hirschmann Automotive have achieved a time saving of 70 percent.

Limiting the number of printers to standard models used across the enterprise reduced costs by two-thirds. Stability is now guaranteed when printing over WAN connections.

Hermann Burtscher, Leader CoC SAP Basis at Hirschmann Automotive:

"With AKI's print management solution, we were able to map the requirements to future business goals in a standardized and reliable way.

Our printing processes are transparent and traceable at all times, extremely reliable and stable even over WAN connections.

Printer setup problems are a thing of the past. This has resulted in a great time saving and the certainty that everything works smoothly and safely".