Seamless Production - Higher level of automation for Mülheim city council's printing team

Load balancing with BENS Spool Software installation for Mülheim. ülheim an der Ruhr is a city of around 170,000 people in North RhineWestphalia, Germany. It is home to the headquarters of many companies, mainly from the food industry, such as Aldi Süd, the Harke Group and the Tengelmann Group. Favoured for its geological location, the city is surrounded by countless beautiful recreation areas, meadows, parks and forests, which occupy more than half of its total area.

Mülheim city council's municipal administration for companies and residents has its very own print shop, which is primarily used to meet its own needs. These needs range from folders, posters and brochures for the various departments to general public announcements, electoral documents and general correspondence. An efficient software system and high production capacity are crucial for success — everything is now handled by Konica Minolta.

BENS Production Printing Software controls automation upgrade für Mülheim city council

Mülheim city council has its very own print shop that produces over five million documents a year, more than two-thirds of which are printed in black and white. It is vital for the print volume to be shared equally among several printers. This requires a high degree of automation to enable the documents to be sent as quickly as possible.

In a consultative and partnership-based approach, Konica Minolta recommended more efficient production with the BENS Production Printing Spooling System for the administration's pool of printers. Konica Minolta supplies two AccurioPress C3080P colour printers and two AccurioPress 6120 monochrome printers.

The data is prepared entirely in Planet Press, an output management tool that acts as a comprehensive toolbox for the communication workflow.

The finished PostScript file is placed in a folder. The BENS spooler then takes the PostScript file and processes it (page count, file number identification and PDF preview). An operator sends all print jobs to a virtual BENS printer. The BENS load-balancing plugin enabled on this virtual printer automatically sends the jobs to the most suitable in-house printer within a group of up to five connected printers. Load balancing is applied to the four connected devices > 2 x 3080P and 2 x 6120.

The intelligent software splits large print jobs into small packages and assigns them to the printing systems, which prevents the individual printers from being overloaded. If a printer reports critical errors for any reason, it is temporarily excluded from the defined group automatically.

When the workload is high, the load-balancing plugin can share the production of multiple copies of a document between all printers, which makes it possible to achieve an extremely high page speed of several hundred copies per minute.

Stefan Fondermann from Mülheim city council said: "We are extremely satisfied — the transition was incredible. The graphical user interface of the BENS Spooler is particularly commendable. The entire workflow is presented in a very transparent and user-friendly manner, and information can be found quickly with just a few clicks. This enables us to respond quickly to a wide variety of challenges and produce print jobs seamlessly on other printing systems if required."

Benefits

Configuration of a system for communicating faster within Mülheim city council
Greater personalisation: a wider range of print jobs can be processed

Challenge

Find new ways to process large amounts of data faster
Avoid worst-case scenarios in which print data is lost

Solution

Create a comprehensive toolbox workflow with complete data preparation in Planet Press.
Introduce the BENS load-balancing plugin software to improve production efficiency
Complete with a clear and user-friendly graphical user interface