The City of Portland Water Bureau is a rate-financed and city-owned utility,
delivering high quality fresh water to the residents of Portland, Oregon and
several surrounding communities. Gravity-fed from the pristine wilderness watershed
on beautiful Mt. Hood, water in the Portland area is considered to be one of
the best in the continental United States for its purity and softness. Solimar
Systems interviewed Barbara Streeter, Information Services Supervisor at the
City of Portland Water Bureau, to discuss the cost savings and process improvements
that resulted from their implementation of the Solimar® Print/Director.
Prior to installing the Solimar Print/Director system, the Portland Water
Bureau experienced printing interruptions and work delays whenever their IBM
mainframe connected printer was down for service or repair. Since the Water
Bureau was limited to printing its mainframe generated print jobs on a single
device, all scheduled jobs including internal reports, correspondence, letters,
and customer bills were constantly at risk of being delayed or re-scheduled.
Printing delays that could affect the distribution of revenue generating customer
water bills were particularly worrisome. The printing and distribution of customer
bills is the lifeblood of the Water Bureau's revenue stream and therefore a
key component of its operations.
"Print jobs are sent to printers in remote work groups, so employees have their work earlier in the day."
Barbara Streeter
City of Portland Water Bureau
After carefully analyzing the situation, the Portland Water Bureau identified
several critical operational challenges to address:
- Bottlenecked print operations
- Lack of automated document distribution and printer access
- Slow distribution of internal print output
- High costs of manually sorting centralized print jobs
- Expensive manual distribution and delivery of print jobs to remote locations.
Due to its robust output management capabilities and feature-rich modular
design, the Solimar Print/Director was selected and installed with a Xerox 4890
NPS printer. "We did not consider any other product," says Streeter.
"With the Solimar Print/Director, we were able to connect the mainframe
to our network and also automate the conversion of Xerox Metacode print streams
to PostScript for decentralized printing."
By installing the Solimar Print/Director, the Water Bureau was able to integrate
its mainframe with a much broader network printing environment, connecting it
with centralized printers, decentralized printers, and LAN PCs. The Water Bureau
also benefits from an open TCP/IP environment, eliminating a variety of proprietary
limitations and restrictions. And, with the additional printing options enabled
by the Solimar Print/Director, the Water Bureau's printing capacity has been
greatly increased, solving the problem of limited printer availability. States
Streeter, "The entire print operation is less fragmented, more streamlined
and far more efficient."
"With Solimar... employees are able to get more done in a shorter period of time."
Barbara Streeter
City of Portland Water Bureau
In addition, the Solimar Print/Director system has dramatically reduced labor
costs in the data processing area, where the staff is no longer required to
manually manage, collate, and deliver printed output to employees. Rather than
direct all of the print jobs to a single centralized location, which resulted
in huge management and distribution expenses, printing is now off-loaded to
remote decentralized printers that are located near the work area of the employee,
saving both time and money. By selecting the Solimar Print/Director for its
output management needs, the Portland Water Bureau has reduced document delivery
time, lowered distribution costs, and allowed its data processing personnel
to return to data processing projects rather than managing and delivering printed
output.
