Printing to Multiple Printers – At Once!

By Kevin Hartman

Anyone who has used Solomon for a few days is probably already very familiar with how reports print. You give Solomon various options like sorting and selecting, you pick the one allowed print destination, and then you press the Print button. Solomon handles the data manipulation and you get pages of paper at your chosen printer.

Solomon’s print options allow for a lot of flexibility in how the report looks, but the choice of just one printer can be a hindrance.

Our Customized Solution:

A client recently had need for a custom inventory picking report that would print to different printers to simplify their picking process. By setting up several printers with a different color of paper in each bin and setting each bin to look like a separate printer on the network they could easily print their item picks to any one bin at a time.

Now, they could have run that custom report through a series of templates, but if there are many templates to process it can take a lot of time. User errors are also more likely to be introduced by omitting a report accidentally or by entering new selection criteria incorrectly. And distributing the report to multiple locations such as several warehouse sites generates more complications in resending the reports with the right information. In any respect it is not a simple solution in terms of ease of use. It was important to automate this whole process.

Working with the client I developed a process screen that they could use to select the orders they wanted to pick and then send that information to the appropriate printers. By setting up a print destination associated with each inventory item in the database there is potential to route hundreds of reports to hundreds of different print points on a company network.

In the original situation the client could place colorful tags on items to know what to choose and ship. It allows for organizing a large warehouse with a wide variety of items. It also allows for controlling shipping directions at multiple locations (using a corporate Intranet). Shipping orders are printed only for the relative items at the relative locations. If locations change then the print routing directions in the system can be altered to redirect reports to the new location.

I was thinking this could be useful in other situations and thought I should share the experience. In this case we did not send output to a file, but it would be easy to do and the resulting .PDF files could be automatically sent to email addresses. Sales personnel could receive weekly updates on products and customers right at their desks. Distributors could be informed about similar information. In either case only appropriate information would be channeled to any destination.

Holding companies with many subordinate organizations might find this useful as well. If they have sub accounts set up in Solomon and various checking accounts to support several different companies all tied to one master database then checking reports that can be directed to only the printers with the correct check stock may be useful in streamlining AP processing. They could also streamline monthly GL reporting by printing or emailing trial balances to each subordinate company based on transactions against the sub account assigned to each company.

These are just the situations I came up with off the top of my head. When users have to transfer reports to many different locations or when it would be more helpful to send reports with narrow selections to specific recipients they would benefit from this type of customization. These functions are just waiting to be automated and can provide an easily measurable benefit. A customization like this would probably only take a few days to actually build so the cost is not high. Take a look around your company today and look for repetitive reporting functions that can be automated.

-Kevin Hartman