MIS Brings Paperless Job Tickets to Washington State

Paper job tickets are a thing of the past at the Washington State Department of Printing. Thanks to the in-plant’s new EFI Monarch print production and management solution, the Tumwater, Wash.-based operation now uses digital job tickets. This not only saves time and printing costs, it is expected to reduce spoilage and rework over time.

“Orders and change requests are entered into the system,” explains Rand Daley, project manager. “Since ticket changes are reflected one place in the system, via the digital ticket, a press operator can have confidence they are looking at the latest version of the ticket when they look at the ticket online.”

The elimination of paper job tickets, along with the daily printed factory schedule, is saving the in-plant more than $2,000 a month in internal printing costs.

In search of a more flexible management information system (MIS), the in-plant went through a four-month RFP process before selecting the Monarch software. It was launched in February. One requirement was support for the Microsoft SQL Server database platform, the state standard. 

“EFI’s support for SQL Server was in beta status, and we were the first customer,” says Daley. “It took considerable adjusting and close work with EFI to stabilize production operations. This was a slightly risky endeavor but we were successful in the first phase of the project.”

Monarch’s PrintFlow scheduling tool has created a more efficient scheduling workflow by reducing idle time and bottlenecks. Jobs with similar properties are grouped together to reduce switchover time. PrintFlow automatically locates the optimal job path based on available equipment, current workload and the status of other job delivery schedules. Each time a proposed change is submitted it provides a new scenario with an impact analysis to see how jobs and customers are affected.

“PrintFlow can even tell you days in advance if the job is predicted to be late,” remarks Jeff Kesseler, scheduler. “This allows management to decide whether to apply additional labor to complete the job on time or give the customer the option for rescheduling their project.”

Though PrintFlow uses custom configurations for automatic job optimization for each work center, he says, the scheduler has the ability to manually alter the lineup to accommodate unforeseen problems with available materials or labor.

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