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Konica Minolta FORCE 75 Production Printing Systems
Konica Minolta and bizhub’s faster printer engine speed and faster system processing saved approximately $50,000 annually for Methodist Healthcare.
The Client
Methodist Healthcare
The Situation
Founded in 1928, Methodist Healthcare (Methodist), an integrated healthcare delivery system based in Memphis, Tenn., has grown from one hospital to a group of eight hospitals, several rural health clinics and a home health agency with approximately 10,000 associates and 1,805 licensed beds. A healthcare organization of this size produces an enormous amount of documents that need to reach many touch points throughout the organization. Schedules, internal memos, patient invoices and service explanations are just a few of the more than two million impressions printed and copied at Methodist each month.
The Challenge
Prior to its relationship with Konica Minolta, Methodist’s data center was using two Xerox 4090 Docuprint Laser Printing Systems to handle the print workload. These printers are capable of print speeds of up to 92-ppm and can each handle a monthly volume of two million impressions.
However, several factors contributed to high costs in both money and time. First, as the existing technology needed to be physically connected to the mainframe, printing was limited to the data center, which resulted in under-utilization and increased cost of operation. In addition, if a job was not completed in time to make the internal courier’s last delivery at 6pm, the data center had to hire an outside courier to make the delivery. And finally, the large production printers in the class of Xerox 4090s produced immense volumes of heat, requiring additional cooling capacity, further adding to overhead costs of the datacenter.
To solve these problems, Methodist needed to decentralize their printing. With distribute-and-print, a print job could be sent from the data center to any printer on Methodist’s network – putting the printing power where people needed it.
The Solution
Konica Minolta proposed replacing the two Xerox machines with four Konica FORCE 75 Production Printing Systems – nearly doubling Methodist’s print capacity while saving $750,000 in replacement capital costs over the original printers. In addition, Methodist would benefit from lower costs-per-page, reduced maintenance, and reduced strain on floor space and cooling resources by upgrading to the smaller, more efficient FORCE 75.
However, to use this new technology, a restructuring of the existing Metacode data stream was necessary because Metacode is a proprietary printer language that will only print to Xerox products.
Methodist brought in Konica Minolta’s Professional Services Group (KMPSG), a diverse team of systems consultants, project managers and integration engineers that work with clients to deliver highly customized business solutions that make customer sites more profitable and productive.
“We analyzed the current state of the Methodist data center printing and the future requirements for the growing organization. As we did so, we quickly realized there was a pressing need to deploy distributed printing through a totally open architecture system,” said Tom Huskisson, manager, Professional Services.
The Konica Minolta team recommended using Barr Enterprise Print Server (BEPS), an application developed by alliance partner, Barr Systems, to move the data from the channel attachment on the main frame over to Methodist’s LAN. Once moved, the data is converted from proprietary Metacode by a common language transformation application. With the conversion completed, the channel-connected printing process was replaced with printing via the IP network.
Konica Minolta’s engineers integrated software applications from Barr Systems, Prism Software and Objectif Lune to complete the data conversion to a modern forms creation process with a leading edge WYSIWYG interface. This combination of applications seamlessly pulls ASCII LCDS data from the mainframe, converts the data to an industry-compatible print format, inserts it into an electronic form and outputs the file to the printer.
Methodist’s data center is now only using 40 forms – a 60 percent reduction – each of which can be easily modified through the advanced, graphical interfaces in the Objectif Lune software. And with the redesign of the Metacode conversion process, there is now only one print server needed for every two printers, thus providing further processing power and printing redundancy.
The Results
The increased speed gained by both the Konica FORCE 75’s faster printer engine speed and faster system processing attributed to savings of approximately $50,000 annually, considering average employee compensation and courier costs.
Methodist has doubled its printing ability, deployed a totally open architecture system ensuring scalability and flexibility for the future, and reduced printing and delivery costs. In addition, the strain on Methodist’s network has also been significantly reduced. By transitioning file conversion to the Prism Software application, the output print data file size was reduced by 67% from the previous method, therefore reducing the volume of data being transferred over the LAN.
Finally, the distributed printing scenario provides failover capabilities should a data center experience a loss of power. This strategic advantage aligns the printing procedure with Methodist’s long-term “high availability” strategy and disaster recovery procedures.
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