Document Management + Collaboration + Distribution +Batch Printing

Some Recent Customers

Plan Express

eQuorum welcomes Plan Express as a new Plot Station customer. It's hard enough for any one engineering company to get their own engineering printing done just right, but Plan Express needs to produce high quality, high volume engineering prints on demand for its large number of different customers. Plot Station is up to this challenge.

Background

Plan Express was established in 1994 in Memphis, Tennessee, the distribution hub for FedEx. Their mission was to offer the best service in Centralized Print Management, Ordering and Distribution with the motto: "Send in your print order by 8 PM Central Time and we will have it delivered by 10:30 AM the next day."

Orders can be placed with Plan Express late into the evening to take advantage of its proximity to the FedEx distribution hub, and now the Airborne/DHL hub, thus plans would make a one-way trip rather than a round-trip. With increased volume in printing and distribution, Plan Express could pass these savings on to its customers.

Today, Plan Express has grown beyond this simple yet sound business concept and has a long list of customers who reap the benefits of centralized plan distribution. Their partnerships with key technology vendors enable a wider variety and higher quality level of services.

The Plot Station Solution

As the volume of their print distribution business has increased, even small delays in printer throughput due to incompatible file formats or quality issues become significant business issues for a company that has built its reputation on meeting deadlines with high quality prints. To meet their increasing print demands, Plan Express has begun using Plot Station to automate much more of their production process.

Plan Express receives files primarily in single and multi-page HPGL/2, PDF and DWF formats. Prior to the implementation of Plot Station, all received files had to be reviewed manually and converted to TIFF using the tools within the various viewing applications. This was a labor intensive effort that begged for automation.

Plan Express is now using Plot Station to automatically convert all incoming plot formats to standard TIFF files and to convert small-format files, such as Microsoft Office, directly to Adobe PDF. This allows Plan Express' Quality Assurance group to use a single tool to review all print-ready files and enables the production staff to standardize their print engines to one format and achieve optimum results.

EDM/PDM Print Server & Web Submit

Plot Station® is a robust, batch printing engine that easily automates direct printing from your existing EDM/PDM system.

With an integrated Plot Station® solution, a user can select multiple files (a handful or hundreds) from your existing EDM/PDM system and submit them directly to any network print device. The productivity benefits of this simple integration are enormous!

Use simple commands from your EDM/PDM system to drop files to Plot Station® directory oriented queues. Or use the Plot Station API to submit drawings with more advanced plot controls. Your files will print to designated devices automatically. You can even set up print destinations for full size prints, half sized prints, or prints that drive the advanced features of your wide format printing devices like folders and stackers.

Extend your batch printing options with the ImageSite® Outbasket web-submit capability.

Use the ImageSite® API to build a customized web-based printing and electronic distribution solution. This allows you to add the ImageSite Outbasket directly to your existing EDM/PDM system to leverage its powerful batch printing, electronic distribution, and even viewing/markup capabilities.

The ImageSite’s XML Integration capabilities allow users to find one or many documents in an existing system, and seamlessly pass them to the Outbasket where users can preview files to be plotted, adjust print/plot settings and re-direct the plots to any networked printing device.

Got Banners & Watermarks?

Plot Station and ImageSite are great with banners and watermarks, which can be an important part of ISO 9000 compliance for many companies. ImageSite includes "Conditional Banners & Watermarks" which can be set up by system administrators to print for all drawings at all times based on the current values of specified document attributes such as Check-in/out Status, Digital Signatures, Document Versions, or other user defined index attributes.

Shopping for a new Plotter?

The following table compares a few key features of some popular engineering plotters.