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Hard Copy
PrintWeasel expedites and organizes big print jobs within a company
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| PrintWeasel lets users see the current printer assignments and the type of documents. |
hen requests for proposals arrive in an estimating office or long contracts are ready for review, firms often print the documents for easier perusal. PrintWeasel automates the process, shaving as much as 70% off the time required to obtain a hard copy.
“With contracts, we deal with a massive amount of paper,” says Ian Foster, executive director of strategy and contract management at Fluor Corp.’s Houston office. “What took days now takes hours.”
About 4,000 people work in Fluor’s Houston office, and many of them need print services. Foster saw PrintWeasel at a conference and thought it would improve efficiency in the print department and, during the past year, it has, he says. Employees send electronic files to the internal print shop and, very quickly, binders with the documents are ready to pick up.
ProExecute of Baton Rouge, La., developed Windows-based PrintWeasel about two years ago to help clients improve productivity associated with printing requests for proposals arriving on disks or from the Internet. Once it was perfected, ProExecute offered the product to other businesses.
“There is no faster way to print multifile, multiformat documents than using PrintWeasel,” says J.J. Safer, ProExecute’s chief executive officer. “We dramatically reduce the labor involved.”
Rather than having someone open each file and click “Print,” PrintWeasel automates the process. The person instructs the application to print a folder on a CD, hard drive or e-mail. PrintWeasel detects the orientation of the pages, the height and width, and sends it to the appropriate printer. It can direct the job to multiple printers without splitting a document. It supports 370 file types, including CAD and other engineering programs.
“We never know what application we are going to get, and with PrintWeasel, regardless of the base application, even if we don’t have it, it allows you to access and print,” Foster says.
PrintWeasel permits customization and enables reprints of an entire job, or portions of it. It creates an audit trail, lists any glitches such as a password-protected file that may have occurred, and can print headers or footers on each page or a routing slip with a job number to help ensure it is returned to the appropriate person.
The application runs in the background, consuming about half of the computer’s resources, so users can continue word processing, answering e-mail or completing other tasks.
PrintWeasel costs $999 per computer and is available for a 30-day trial. Installation is as easy as a download, Safer says. PrintWeasel requires no special training, but ProExecute offers online support. The next version of PrintWeasel, which became available earlier this year, functions with Documentum, the Web-based content and storage management program.
Time savings vary depending on the number of printers on the network and the speed of those devices. Safer estimates a job that would take seven days to print in-house using traditional methods can be completed in 12 hours with PrintWeasel, giving estimators more time to review the documents and prepare the bid.
“Printing is not important in the grand scheme of making money. What’s important is the estimating process,” says Safer, adding that with PrintWeasel, “you can increase the productivity of the department and potentially increase the accuracy of the department, too.”
ProExecute
15961 Airline Hwy.
Baton Rouge, La. 70817
866-587-7639
225-756-5959 x1102
www.proexecute.com
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