Re: Suggestions wanted on reducing time to assemble month-end invoices -- MIDRANGE-L

Depending on what the prints contain, such as over printing/bold/font
size changes/graphics/etc...

I wonder if it would be possible to copy the spool files (assuming one
is inv and the other is statements) to two files, then merge the output
in to one continuous stream print. That way the "merge" will be done
before the output is physically printed. (Obviously I'm assuming that
the you currently have one long spool file of inv's and one long spool
of statements.)

Or perhaps the use of pdf (or similar) to create the pre-merged print...

Taking it one step further, if you have a multiple draw printer (and
assuming the stream can change draw mid stream)... the invoice pages
could be pulled from draw one (pink) then the detail print from draw two
(white) that way the collating is done and all the "sorter" needs to do
is break the stack on page colour.

I guess if such a thing exists, a printer with three draws that could
have one draw with envelopes in would be even better as the stack would
be not only marked by a sheet colour change but also a physically
different medium (the envelope).

While still needing a bod to stuff the envelopes, the time to complete
would be greatly reduced.

We did something similar at one company I worked for where it was
decided that re-writing the print routines would be to costly and would
be much slower (multiple calls, multiple splf's, not a single large run
of inv's and then a single large run of statements), so we did the merge
in a different program (as detailed above) and hard coded the printer
escape codes into the resultant spool file to change the draw "on the
fly".

Obviously the prints were un-beautified as we dropped the "bold"
printing (which was done by printing a line twice and similar print
tricks as the original spools were printed on either a band printer, or
an industrial size dot matrix (it was loud what ever type it was)) but
we found that moving to a 2 draw A4 laser print removed most of the need
of clever printing tricks. Oh and while we were reading the spool files,
and re-printing them, we also took the time to tidy up some of the
layout and to re-number the pages using an internal counter so that the
inv and then statements pages were numbered logically.

On Thu, 2017-11-02 at 16:07 -0500, Vernon Hamberg wrote:

Y'all

We are at 7.1 and cannot upgrade to 7.3 at the moment, as we want to do.

We have a month-end process (Robot job) that prints invoice reprints for
customers who want snail mail.

In that same process we print an itemized statement of those invoices -
separate programs.

Both outputs are in order of the billing address - we send everything
together that goes to a single billing address, while each invoice may
be for different service addresses.

Currently it takes 8 person-days to riffle through the stacks of
invoices and the stacks of statements and match them up, then stuff them
into envelopes or whatever.

Our central print services has been talking with us about a machine that
can print or sort, burst according to, say, a 2D barcode, and stuff each
set into some kind of envelope.

Problem is, it can stuff only up to maybe 8 sheets. Our bundles often
have over 100 sheets to the same billing address.

I was told that there might not always be a 1-to-1 relationship between
statement and invoice.

Invoice reprints can either be AFPDS or USERASCII (we are using the
AFPRSC keyword at 7.1 and converting for inclusion of PNG signatures).

It seems we need some other way to handle this, to reduce the
person-time involved. And help with accuracy (that hasn't been brought
up, I just mention it, since people currently go through the stacks and
scan by eye for a change in billing address).

So I/we have been talking about finding a way to combine the output of
the 2 programs in a way that would improve the time to do this by hand.
1. Put in a colored separator sheet or other marker to help people
identify a set of invoices
2. Combine the output from the 2 programs in the correct order
(statement first, then related invoices)

I've done a little research on a setting on the DEVD for separator
drawer and separator program, as well as other separator settings on
PRTF and OUTQ. And am aware of separator settings on printers, though
not very much up on that.

We are open to commercial solutions within some kind of reason.

Regards
Vern