PJL Controlled Delivery to the Rescue

When SAP print jobs are submitted but disappear before they reach the printer, this causes business processes to grind to a halt. But what’s even worse is when a print job is printed twice through failed spooling, bad error recovery, or human error. In that case, real business processes may be duplicated. For example, multiple shipments may be sent in error to a customer or partner company, leading to unnecessary business expense.

To prevent this from happening, LRS output management software takes advantage of the Printer Job Language (PJL) protocol. This intelligent print method facilities bi-directional communication between a sending application and an output device. The LRS software enables the PJL protocol, and listens for the events reported by the printer. These include job and device status together with feedback on each page or label printed.

In the case of printer failure or power disruption, our software has a record of the last page successfully printed. The software will continue to monitor the network for the printer to come back online, at which point the print job will resume printing at exactly the point it failed at.

PJL Support

Nearly all major hardware vendors support some level of PJL functionality, though some are better than others.

In the case of some older printers, the use of PJL will slow down the number of small jobs that a printer can process in a given time period. This is because the software will not send a new job until the old job is completely finished, and here is a slight pause then between jobs. For this reason, LRS invented the overlapping PJL technique, which has the ability to send multiple print jobs in parallel and track the progress of each.

Assured delivery is especially important in warehouse environment, where automatic (i.e., non-user-initiated) printing is a way of life. Often, the documents being printed are pick lists or labels used by warehouse workers as they gather items for shipment. Missing or duplicate print items represent costly mistakes.

To prevent this from happening, LRS developed SAP Warehouse Pull Printing. This ensures not only that warehouse output is printed, but that the correct warehouse worker received the document(s) corresponding to the order. The solution works on any printer (including label printers), and if a printer becomes unavailable the user can simply go to another printer to retrieve the print job. To retrieve the print job, the user scans a bar code on a bar code reader attached to the output device via an intelligent interface box.

The result is a reliable means of print delivery with positive confirmation of the recipient’s identity and location.

A similar technique can be applied to a laser reader on a conveyor belt system, the warehouse automation system can pass the read barcode over an API to VPSX, which has been collecting (but not printing) all the output for a particular shipment. When we receive the shipment ID from the warehouse automation system, all the output for that shipment is gathered together as a single print job and sent to a printer next to conveyor belt system. This ensures all the print data for a particular shipment is always present for that shipment. Some customers invest in mechanical additions to the printer that will push the paper into the shipment tray.

USE CASE: Global Healthcare Provider

Global provider of healthcare successfully moves away from their on-premise SAP platform.

Why Change? The customer had been using an output management solution, but they felt uncertain about its future. They were also looking to outsource versus having an on-premise SAP platform.
Why Now? The output management solution was outdated and the customer was migrating four financial instances on SAP ECC 6 to one on S4/HANA.
Why LRS? The SAP print environment proposed by the ITO provided an end-to-end service by a single IT provider. The new service includes an agreed SLA to ensure SAP printing does not impact global business operations.

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