Testimony

Feedback: optimization of a production
Interview with Thierry Cabel / France Télécom / Orange
Resp. Pilotage Production Documents

What were your objectives before the solution was installed?

The main aim was to cut down the number of production sites and discuss the issue of the machine stock on 4 sites in relation to the number of pages to be printed.
To drastically reduce single-sheet printing and replace it with continuous-feed printing to reduce fee costs per page
And to reduce the amount of waste generated by the reel operation using Carroll reels by replacing it with “pinless” printing.

Without measuring the consequence of our decision to do away with the Carroll reels, we were very quickly faced with an enriching of our document bodies with guide marks that we didn’t want to be too intrusive
Internally, we have OMR codes for our own management rules, ad we had to add the machine codes to these to make sure that the printers were synchronised and the rectos were paired up with the versos.
We soon decided to use the 2D code to load in these guide marks without “overshadowing” the body of our documents too much.
By using this new guide method, we have cleared a major hurdle, but it has generated extra development costs.
The new “input”, which was not evaluated at the start of the project, has allowed us to test the supplier’s ability to support us in this approach and ensure that we keep to our deployment deadlines.

Prior to 2004 we used 100% IBM technology. The supplier had been with us since 1998 and we wanted to see what was happening outside this very restricted perimeter. But we wanted to keep our options open with regard to the final distribution of the machine stock.
We no longer wanted to have a single supplier for this segment.

- High availability levels: the machines are always “ready to go”. It helps that they are relatively new, but after 2 years of operation, we don’t have any problems with them
- The bundle 5 controls are easy to use
- Easy to start up, and easy to interpret malfunctions
- The presence of a technician on site

However, there are still a few concerns about supply modules on the Orléans site, more to do with the quality of the electricity supply than with a design fault.

After a difficult start due to lack of understanding between the various people involved about what was expected, OCE quickly grasped the issues and worked as a real force for proposal to provide the most satisfactory answers to requests without necessarily asking the client to change his own management rules
From then on, once the rules were understood, things never really went wrong again.
Whenever they are called upon, the staff are quick to intervene. This is helped by the fact that they are physically present on the site, and by the fact that an internal escalation procedure has been introduced to find a lasting solution
An implicit awareness that it is to everyone’s advantage to have the machines at maximum availability during production periods
With regard to software quality, we have not suffered any significant incidents to cause us to have any doubts about the architecture.