Ricoh Canada has several locations across the country which include substantial warehouse locations as well as smaller warehouses within their sales branches. These locations receive numerous orders for equipment and use pick tickets to instruct warehouse staff on the items needed to be shipped to their customers or resellers. Previously, multipart / pre-printed forms were purchased and inventoried at all locations, and pick tickets were printed using line printers.
Ricoh Canada Challenges
Ricoh Canada has several locations across the country, including substantial warehouse locations and smaller warehouses within their sales branches. These locations receive numerous orders for equipment and use pick tickets to instruct warehouse staff on the items needed to be shipped to their customers or resellers. Previously, multipart / pre-printed forms were purchased and inventoried at all locations, and pick tickets were printed using line printers.
The Drawbacks With This Method Are Obvious:
- Frequent printer jams
- Wasting multipart forms
- More space needed to store multipart / pre-printed forms
- Expensive form redesigns
- Slow print speeds
Additionally, the format of the pick tickets was disorganized and consisted of multiple pages. This made it extremely complicated and difficult for the warehouse staff to keep track of what items were picked and what remained to be picked.
Solution Implemented By Ricoh Canada
By implementing FabSoft’s SysConnect, Ricoh Canada enhanced this inefficient process. With SysConnect, they can now recreate a more professional-looking form that can be printed on printing paper with a high-speed MFP or laser printer. To ensure that SysConnect can be utilized in all of their locations throughout the country, Ricoh Canada uses a Baan ERP system which does mainframe printing to save a printer or print queue for each location that sends the jobs to the SysConnect server.
Because the Baan system output is not uniquely recognizable by the content, the Baan printer set up for each location uses a different LPR queue name. Using FabSoft’s LPD Server option, the unique LPR queue name for each job is automatically associated with the correct form. This enables SysConnect to see which output device to send the job to from the many different devices throughout the country.
A representative from Ricoh Canada says:
“The bottom line is that it works more easily than the old method. It’s faster, quieter, and easier to read, uses fewer pages, and presents a more professional image to our customers and partners. In the future, we can convey marketing messages using this same infrastructure or even have our pick-lists re-ordered to sort multiple jobs into an aggregated job, sorted by aisles, then bins, etc. (almost like a postal sort to improve efficiency in the warehouse) and then have the shipping confirmation and packing slip print elsewhere to verify the orders. We already have a multipart form configuration for our main warehouse.”
SysConnect Benefits For Ricoh Canada
- Ownership Through Local Uniqueness – Since both branches/warehouses had input on their requirements for forms, there is now an immediate sense of ownership in handling the documents. Now, they can have the extra statements that pertain to their region.
- Consistent, Professional Looking Documents – There is now a complete consistency in appearance. The orders will all arrive with similar paperwork, which helps the customers’ receiving teams assemble orders shipped from different locations.
- Improved Productivity – With the old method, pick tickets were unclear and sometimes missing, causing a lot of downstream communication errors, and orders were sometimes shipped twice. As a result, double-checking each pick ticket and the pulled items became a regular function. Since documents are well formatted and contain fewer pages, productivity has increased. With the new SysConnect system, the warehouse staff feels they have more control over their activities. Even the administrators in the office can prepare their orders faster by reviewing the screen content with the page content.
- Cost Accounting – Ricoh Canada incurred substantial costs from managing pre-printed forms and line printers. They constantly purchased, inventoried, and loaded pre-printed forms. With the SysConnect system, forms are now printed on regular printing paper using an MFP or laser printer. Changes can be made to forms on-demand without worrying about ordering additional forms and wasting old ones.