Case Studies

Virco Manufacturing Eliminates Bottlenecks with Ethernet Connectivity

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Intermec Printers are Now Placed Anywhere on the Network and Plant Floor. Keeping up with supply and demand in today’s manufacturing arena is challenging and many of the small manufacturing companies we grew up with no longer exist. Some have closed; others have been bought out or merged with another company. Those that have survived have done so because they’ve invested in product development, broadened their customer base, expanded their distribution centers, and upgraded their enterprise systems to better manage their increasing volume of business.

One company that has not only survived, but thrived is Virco Mfg. Corporation, which began business back in the Fifties. Starting as a local supplier of chairs and desks for Los Angeles-area schools, they have become a leading supplier of tables, chairs and storage equipment for offices, convention centers, auditoriums, places of worship, hotels and related settings. They’re also the largest manufacturer of educational furniture in the United States. Virco employs over 2,400 people nationwide in state-of-the-art manufacturing and distribution facilities in Torrance, California and Conway, Arkansas.

Challenge

Virco has over 100 Intermec EasyCoder 3400 printers distributed in their manufacturing facilities. They use the printers to print the UPC codes and “Care and Use” labels that they apply to their products.

The printers in all locations are connected to the same SAP system, which contains the data to create the wide variety of labels that Virco needs to print on a daily basis. The printers are then driven by a system developed by Data Recognition that uses an ODBC connection to a Microsoft Access database that is populated with exported data from SAP.

Virco has been using Intermec printers for 5 ½ years, but networked them via a multi-drop protocol, which meant all the printers were connected via the same cable and driven from the same print server.This placed a critical restriction on the placement of printers around their production facilities.It also limited the number of printers they could use in each plant to 32, which created a workflow bottleneck during peak seasons.

Virco needed a solution that would allow them to place the printers in the optimum locations as well as support as many printers as their manufacturing facilities needed to meet their production schedules.

Solution

The answer was simple. Because Virco’s printers could accommodate internal Ethernet cards, Intermec, working with their business partner Data Recognition, Inc., installed EasyLAN 10i networking cards so the printers could be attached directly to their SAP system. Now Virco could place printers anywhere they were needed. And because their network was wired virtually everywhere in the plant, it eliminated most placement restrictions.

Results

“There are several benefits to our switch to the Intermec Ethernet printing solution,” said Greg Sharp of Virco.“First, my support staff no longer spends hours locating a cut cable or communication problem as they did in the multi-drop environment supporting 50 printers in two locations. Second, it allows easy redundancy of print servers to control the printers and eliminates downtime when a server is offline. In addition, I can add or re-locate a printer in just a few minutes with normal print server type administration.”

With the switch to Ethernet connectivity for their printers, Virco can now convert to new formats and products much faster than on the previous system, increasing productivity. In addition, support personnel have been freed from printer troubleshooting and can focus on other critical areas where they’re needed.

Intermec’s Ethernet connectivity has allowed Virco to eliminate the printer bottleneck and help their manufacturing facilities meet their production schedules.