Corporate Express, the world`s largest supplier of office goods, has deployed Dazel to guarantee delivery of documents across its widely dispersed operations around the world.
Corporate Express is a publicly traded, Fortune 500 company and the world`s largest single-source supplier of non-production goods and services such as office supplies, computer supplies, forms and document management, desktop packaged software, promotional items and delivery services to large corporations in a $300bn global industry.
Corporate Express operates in approximately 500 locations, including 80 distribution centers. It runs a fleet of more than 10 000 delivery vehicles and employs 28 000 people in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France, Italy, Ireland and the United Kingdom.
Objective
Four years ago, Corporate Express was in the process of acquiring and integrating several hundred local and regional non-production supply companies throughout the world into the Corporate Express family.
Most of these companies used localised printers to handle output from PCs and mid-sized Unix machines and did not have the infrastructure to manage distributed output on a global scale. Corporate Express realised that to integrate these companies into its organisation, it needed to centralise output management operations.
Corporate Express began looking for a single, scalable and centralised solution that would manage output throughout its distributed enterprise.
"We went looking for an output management solution before we had a problem," said Dave Leonard, CTO, Corporate Express. "We were dealing with companies that were working with one printer. Overall operations were not sophisticated, and we knew that integrating all of the output into a seamless, streamlined system would require an enterprise-wide solution."
Solution
Corporate Express looked to Dazel in 1996 for a solution to the problem. Many of the acquired companies were small-scale operations, with only a single printer at one location. Leonard realised that integrating these destinations into the Corporate Express network would create problems in the form of lost output.
Corporate Express needed a solution to manage its customer, order, purchasing and warehousing applications. They created large amounts of Postscript output in the form of division field reports, back-order reports and profitability analysis reports which then needed to be routed to printers, faxes and e-mails.
Initially, Corporate Express implemented a single, centralised Dazel Output Server to manage print-only output to 30 printers distributed throughout the US Critical to Corporate Express`s selection of Dazel was the Dazel server`s similarity to the JES environment that existed on the mainframe. Without this similarity, full-scale implementation of Corporate Express`s new systems would force the creation of hundreds of Unix scripts to control output.
"In addition to print output, we had existing order fulfilment systems that needed to be managed and controlled as a whole. So we used Dazel as a way to initiate periodic batch transactions between them," Leonard says. "Dazel served as our EDI between the central system and the remote sites."
After that successful initial trial, Corporate Express scaled up the implementation over the next two years to include 20 Dazel Output Servers at the company`s headquarters in Broomfield, Colorado. Within several months of the implementation, the Dazel Output Server was managing output to 168 printer destinations, 22 FTP destinations and one fax queue that faxed documents to 24 fax modems.
Leonard notes: "Dazel enabled Corporate Express employees who were running the field operations, customer service and warehouses to get down to the company`s core business and do their jobs."
Now, Dazel Output Servers and fax servers manage more than 100 000 pages of output per day. Dazel manages output for part of Corporate Express`s supply chain; it routes documents to Corporate Express`s print
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