Triplicate Orders

[Dorothy]

I've been asked to resdesign for laser printing an existing printout for work orders. These are currently done in triplicate on tri colored paper on a dot matrix printer.

They would prefer to keep the triplicate, three color scheme for each work order.

Has anyone dealt with this problem before? Any help would be appreciated.

Dorothy Wasserman

[Tom Cone Jr]

RE: Triplicate Orders

Sounds interesting. If you're not changing paper stock, how the heck is the laser printer going to make an impression on the second and third copies of each sheet?

I must be missing something obvious. Pay no attention.

-- tom

[Dorothy]

RE: Triplicate Orders

Sorry Tom, I should have been clearer.

Of course we need to change paper stock, but that is exactly the problem. Is there a source for three colored laser paper? And even if there is, how do you deal with a paper jam...

So I'm thinking of running the work orders as a batch job. And repeating this batch job twice more, each time making sure the paper color has been changed.

Am I thinking in the right direction? Has anyone else been faced with this kind of changeover? How have you dealt with it.

TIA

Dorothy

[forskare]

RE: Triplicate Orders

How about printing it once with the laser and then make copies with a copier? Printer or copier, you have to change the paper. With a copier, paper jambs gave no effect as there is no printing sequence to get out of wack.

Now... tell me they don't have a copier. But...that's how we handle it.

kenn

[Ohlen Cartmell]

RE: Triplicate Orders

Boy, does this seem to be going backwards. Let's see, now we print one time and separate the copies and they're on their way. In the future we want to print one time and copy two and then put them back together or we want to print them 3 times, put them in piles and then colate the piles. Then we can finally send them on their way. I don't know, this doesn't sound like progress to me. Impact printers are still made because they are still the best at some things. I hope you get lots of money for turning their fairly efficient process into an unweildy nightmare.

[JohnZaleski]

RE: Triplicate Orders

Dorothy,
I'm not sure that any of this will work, but you could try a few things.
1) If the work orders aren't longer than one page, preload the paper Red,Yellow and blue into a single stack (this will be a little work).Then print 3 copies of the work order. Same work order 3 times. You might be able to define a windows printer with 3 copies as the default setting of that printer. This could get wierd if there is a jam.
2) You might be able to do something of the same thing with paper loaded into different bins. Define 3 windows printer with 3 default bins according to color, define 3 reports with specified printers (bins) and print a single work order 3 times.
Good Luck,
John

[ChrisHawkes]

RE: Triplicate Orders

From the sublime to the ridiculous, I have a client that wanted to do the same thing. They bought a colour laser printer and printed each copy in a different colour. This did mean three separate identical reports being set up. This has worked extremely well for them, but not necessarily something I would always recommend. I hope this information is useful.

Chris

[Dorothy]

RE: Triplicate Orders

Thank you all for your suggestions. It will help in presenting the options to the client.

Dorothy

[Dan Blank]

RE: Triplicate Orders

Just another thought to add:
Why not print the report three times, all on the same color paper. Just have the footer read "For Accounting" on page 1, and on page 2 have the footer read "For Customer", and on page 3 the footer reads "For Sales", or whatever needs to be printed. For that matter you could have the footer read, "Yellow Copy", "White Copy", "Pink Copy".

Just a thought.
Dan

[Dorothy]

RE: Triplicate Orders

Hi Dan,

Thanks. I'll add that option at the presentation.

It's also been suggested that the colored papers be preprinted with the info: For Sales, etc. so that they can have both the message and color.

Impact printing sure has it's place. But they want to go laser!

Dorothy

[Phil Rolf]

RE: Triplicate Orders

I ran into this same problem with my company. I have decided to just print the report three times to the laser printer (you can generate a very nice looking invoice). Time is expensive. Therefore, I thought of the idea that was mentioned in another thread about putting info on the footer of the invoice. However that means REGENERATING the report 3 times. My invoices, packing slips can be as many as 6 pages long. I can't afford to wait around. I enter the number of copies I need using the printer setup screen. I found it to be faster.

Preloading colored paper is a NIGHTMARE.....don't do it.

There is problems with the pages getting mixed up. But the girls are becoming accustomed to the problems that can occur and a being more careful...

[csda1]

RE: Triplicate Orders

Hi Dorothy,

Just to make it clear, a laser printer, ink jet and any other Non-Impact printing technology can not make 3 copies simultaneously (ala carbon paper).

You can potentially have 3 different paper bins (on expensive laser printers) feeding 3 separate color paper stock.

This could be collated by printing a single record to three separate printer definitions (all the same except for the bin to print from), then looping through the records. Alternately, you can print all records for 1 color, then repeat the next two, and then colllate

Finally, you could just have 3 separate printers as well.

Another method would be to precollate the different color papers, then print 3 copies of each record from 1 laser printer.

Regards,

Ira J. Perlow
Computer Systems Design & Associates
[email protected]

[Dorothy]

RE: Triplicate Orders

Hi Phillip and Ira

The work orders are only one page long.
It seems I need to have them choose which nightmare they can live with.
Precollating the colored papers would only produce utter confusion if there should be ( and there will be ) a paper jam. So that's out.

The more I think of how "the flow goes", these work orders don't need to be collated at all - each copy goes to a different department anyway. So printing three separate times or to three separate bins each with a different color paper seems not so daunting and might actually facilitate "the flow".

Thanks for helping me think this out. Y'all make this message board a living treasure.

Dorothy

[Finian Lennon]

RE: Triplicate Orders

Just to add an afterthought ... we have found that getting A5 to work consistently with multiple tray printers can be a pain. If you use just a single printer driver, allowing the user to select one of say three trays, when the user makes a tray selection that selection "sticks", the next print job doesn't pop up the option to select the tray and subsequent jobs all go to the last selected tray. You can work around this by installing additional printer drivers each configured with a single tray, but it's ugly and confusing to users.

Finian

[Pat Bremkamp]

RE: Triplicate Orders

One more idea...you can purchase cheap laser printers for $300~$500. So, why don't you put a cheap laser in each department and print three times...once to each printer. The department can choose whatever color they want and you don't have to worry about colating or bins or whatever.