As a busy IT manager, among the very last things you want to do is to spend hours fiddling with a printer to get it to do what it is supposed to. That was a challenge faced by Crispin Duncan, network administrator at motor dealership company Porter Motor Group, who routinely found himself wrestling with unco-operative machines, impeding the flow of business.
And, while the company's printing requirements aren't straightforward, they are also not particularly unusual; however, the frustration of getting machines to interpret and print landscape reports was instantly solved with the installation of Oki laser printers.
A wholly owned subsidiary of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange-listed Imperial Group, Porter Motor Group operates 19 dealerships nationwide.
Duncan explains: “We run a remote desktop environment with an application that contacts a database through which all users at the dealerships execute print jobs. These jobs relate to the company's line of business: job cards, invoices, orders and reports.”
The desk-side printer environment at Imperial Group consists of machines from a number of different manufacturers. While most of the jobs executed without any trouble, the real issue came with landscape-orientation of certain reports. “The printer drivers just would not do it; they could not interpret the job and would continually print it in portrait mode; with that orientation, the printed report is useless.”
It sounds like a relatively straightforward problem, but Duncan says sorting it out was a source of ongoing difficulty and frustration. “Spending two or three hours trying to find drivers and configure a single printer is hardly productive. In some instances, not even that level of intervention would get the machine to produce the report in the appropriate orientation.”
What Duncan was initially unaware of is that Oki has extended its range of machines considerably. “We use the line printers extensively in our back-office, where they are perfectly suited to the task. When the lasers were suggested as a solution to the problem I was handling, I was initially sceptical,” he says.
However, Printacom regional channel manager Lina Cardoso-Pieterse was confident that this was a minor challenge for Oki machines, and provided a number of demonstration machines.
“The results were immediate. There was no need to do any fiddling, fancy configuration, searching for special drivers or anything like that. The Oki machines just did what they were supposed to do straight out of the box,” says Duncan, admitting to being pleasantly surprised by the performance of the machines.
“What this has demonstrated to us is that flexibility in driver software is essential for printers in a business environment. While our needs are not particularly complex, and the database from which we work is certainly not unique, but is used quite widely in the motor industry, most printers on the market today can't deal with that,” Duncan continues.
He says a printer shouldn't be a source of complexity or difficulty in any IT environment. “Where printers are concerned, you really should be in a position to expect the device to simply do what it is supposed to. That's probably the most satisfying attribute of the Oki machines; install one, put paper into it and it delivers prints. No problem.”
As a consequence, says Duncan, his perceptions of Oki have changed considerably. “Because we use the line printers, we'd always thought of Oki as a dot-matrix brand. Now, however, we have an option for the desk-side, which not only works properly, but is also quiet and very fast.”
So fast, he quips, that coffee breaks have had to become shorter. “With other machines, there was time to grab a cup between hitting 'print' and collecting the job!”
Cardoso-Pieterse says Oki has put a lot of work into not only the printers themselves, but the drivers. “When Oki says it is Windows compatible, then it is Windows compatible. We're happy to have solved an ongoing headache for Porters Motor Group just by delivering standard machines."
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