Being There Kit Provides Remote Printer Diagnosis
Rapid response. It’s what every customer wants. And it’s why Xerox has 17-year veterans like Robert Stock, a performance process manager. If a piece of equipment can be fixed, he’ll fix it. But it might take him a while to get to a customer’s site.
“I got the call to go out to a site near Dallas to investigate a problem that baffled the first-level support guy,” says Stock. “It took me a good part of a day to get there from San Francisco, but it only took an hour for me to find the cause of the problem and fix it. It took me another day to get home. I remember thinking on the trip home that there had to be a better way.” And, indeed, there was.
Stock’s solution was simple and elegant, easy to deploy on site, and cost-effective. Anyone in Xerox’s field service group, regardless of the location of the misbehaving equipment, can use it because it requires essentially no training to get the solution up, running, and working on the problem. The answer might seem obvious to anyone who’s used a Mac and iChat AV, but these items weren’t standard equipment in Xerox’s repair kit, at least not at first.
The 24/7 Challenges of DocuPrint® Systems
Xerox’s DocuPrint line of high-speed continuous feed (CF) digital printers are deployed in high-volume sites that specialize in quick turnarounds. Essentially, these monsters devour rolls of paper at one end and spit finished and bound works out the other. If required, a DocuPrint CF printer can deliver The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Norton Critical Edition) in less than 20 minutes. Generally, the jobs are more prosaic but no less critical: transactional processing such as paycheck printing or publishing multiple copies of books, reports, catalogs, and other printed matter.
DocuPrint customers are high-end copy centers and small- to mid-sized publishers who, in turn, serve customers whose jobs are too big to handle in-house but not large enough to warrant the expense of using a traditional offset press. The work is demanding, the deadlines are tight, and the tolerance for downtime is near zero.
As proud as Xerox is of its DocuPrint line, the company is perhaps even prouder of the service organization that keeps every machine consuming paper nonstop at top speed. Xerox provides local technicians within two hours of every customer site. If this first level of support is stumped, the call goes out to the specialist hot line. As the last line of defense, Stock and his group of strategically placed super specialists are flown in. It’s an effective system, except for the lost time spent waiting while the solution is in transit. Sending specialists to the site is expensive for Xerox, and the resulting downtime can mean lost revenue for its customers.
Apple Has Eyes for Xerox
In a classic Newtonian moment, Stock was figuratively struck on the head by Apple technology. Stock, a Mac user, was using iChat to speak with his mother. “This got me to thinking that perhaps I could use AV chat technology to diagnose CF printer problems from my office,“ muses Stock. “I was a bit skeptical at first that the video quality would be good enough but decided to investigate nevertheless.”
It turned out that Apple’s video codec is phenomenal. It can deliver video that looks good even when you’re watching paper moving at high speed.
Exercising due diligence, Stock examined possible Windows-based solutions as well as those that leveraged Apple technology. He began by looking at the leading Windows-based video conferencing programs, but the video quality was too low. However, Apple’s iChat AV, especially when used with an Apple iSight camera, delivered sharp and clear video. Eureka!
“I was trying to understand why the video looked so much better on my Mac,” says Stock. “It turned out that Apple’s video codec (compressor-decompressor) is phenomenal. It can deliver video that looks good even when you’re watching paper moving at high speed. With iChat, we were able to detect paper shifts and flutter.”
