Sunoco Shifts Into High Gear With Solimar® Print/Director

Sunoco, Inc. is a leading manufacturer and marketer of petroleum and petrochemical products in the Eastern United States. With its headquarters in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Sunoco operates five domestic refineries with a daily processing capacity of 890,000 barrels of crude oil, and markets gasoline through over 4,500 retail outlets, from Maine to Florida, and west to Indiana.

Solimar Systems recently interviewed Larry Watts, Jr., Systems Analyst at Sunoco, to discuss how installing the Solimar® Print/Director system has saved time and streamlined operations within the credit card processing center, while at the same time enabling the implementation of new printer technology without disrupting operations.

"We're saving time and money compared to the way we used to operate."

Larry Watts, Jr.
Sunoco, Inc.

Over the years, Sunoco's credit card processing center has invested heavily in developing a wide variety of LCDS legacy applications to support the company's operations. The majority of those applications were printed on Xerox 4050 and 4090 laser printers. Sunoco wanted to upgrade their print operations by replacing the older 4050 and 4090 devices with a more modern Xerox DocuTech 6100 that could be connected to their network. However, the new print device could not natively process Sunoco's existing LCDS print streams.

The estimated development effort involved with reprogramming the existing applications from LCDS to PostScript proved to be cost prohibitive. "We wanted to upgrade our printers and connect them to the network for easier access, but without the time and expense of re-doing our applications," says Watts. In addition to print stream incompatibility issues with the new device, Sunoco encountered other challenges that needed to be addressed, such as limited reprint capabilities and complex business processes. Sunoco had originally installed a product from another vendor to address these requirements, but it fell short of what was needed for their environment.

"Enabling new printers on our network and not having to touch our legacy applications was key."

Larry Watts, Jr.
Sunoco, Inc.

With the help of Xerox, Sunoco selected and implemented the Solimar Print/Director to replace the existing device. The Solimar RJE connectivity module allows the Print/Director system to seamlessly receive LCDS data streams from Sunoco's mainframe. In addition, Print/Director's XCHANGE::PostScript transform module automatically converts Sunoco's data streams and sends the resulting print files to network printers via TCP/IP. Best of all, the entire implementation was performed without the financial, human resource and/or business interruption costs commonly associated with redeveloping existing document applications.

The Sunoco management team has credited the automation functionality of Print/Director as reducing manual steps and decreasing labor costs by thousands of dollars per year. "Our output process is now simplified and yet we have more functionality," states Watts. "We're saving time and money compared to the way we used to operate."

The Print/Director system accomplished everything that Sunoco wanted to do, including:

• Enabling modern printers to be connected to the TCP/IP network
• Enabling LCDS legacy applications to be sent and printed via PostScript printers
• Allowing for easy reprints without reprocessing output from the host
• Streamlining and simplifying output processes with increased management control