Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

Return on investment is seldom as palpable. A subsidiary of a well-known electronics manufacturer is using a $500 piece of software to make a serious dent in the 75,000 to 100,000 pages of paper reports its AS/400 generates each month. The subsidiary used to employ two people for three days every month to rip and sort stacks of green-bar paper. The company installed OctoPDF from JBM Systems, and now those reports are distributed electronically in PDF format.

"What would happen is, on the first of the month, the AS/400 would start churning out page after page of reports," says a systems administrator for the manufacturer. "Two people would work for three days straight, physically ripping apart the reports and trying to get them all separated and distributed around the country." (We are not disclosing the name of the company because the company and JBM Systems requested it not be identified due to competitive reasons.)

"I was browsing the Net, looking for a solution to eliminate this waste of paper and man hours," the administrator says. "I had a few magazine clippings for spool-to-print solutions. And I came across Remote Print Manager, and I liked that. Through RPM, I found out about OctoPDF, and I liked that. The cost was right."

RPM is distributed by a company called Brooks Internet Software. RPM works with OctoPDF by providing the line printer requester (LPR) interface for intercepting the print data streams from any host acting as the line printer daemon (LPD), which could be an OS/400, OS/390, Unix, or Windows server. OctoPDF, which sits on a Windows PC, then converts the text provided by RPM into the PDF format. RPM ranges in price from $149 to $295 per server and is a prerequisite for using OctoPDF.

About two months ago, the administrator installed RPM and OctoPDF. He says there was a considerable amount of legwork to configure the default OS/400 output queues to point at the RPM/OctoPDF setup, which would automatically load the reports into certain directories that users could access off a file server. But considering the savings the subsidiary has realized, in terms of eliminating paper waste, reclaiming lost man hours, and (in the future) getting rid of wide-format dot matrix line printers, it has been well worth the effort, he says.

The administrator augmented his RPM-OctoPDF setup with a report-building tool called Monarch, distributed by a company called Datawatch. This allows users to do even more with the reports such as load pieces of data into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

Before RPM and OctoPDF were installed, employees at the subsidiary would get a stack of paper, which would often end up filed away in a cabinet, the administrator says. "Now they can just look at the pages they want and print them if they want to," he says. "They love it. We've gotten rave reviews the first couple of months. Now they can actually use these reports."

In the first two months of use, the subsidiary has steadily applied the RPM-OctoPDF setup to more of its usual monthly print output, and currently about 30 to 40 percent of the estimated 75,000 to 100,000 pages of monthly paper output have been replaced with PDF documents. The administrator, who is based in the subsidiary's Chicago office, says other subsidiary locations that use the AS/400 have been inquiring about his new setup, and that it will likely spread to those other locations.

JBM Systems, which started marketing OctoPDF in March, was founded in Massachusetts by a programmer, Murray Bob. Bob said the impetus for writing OctoPDF came from the very expensive mainframe solutions on the market. "I had to come up with a solution to take reports to the Web," he says. "A mainframe solution would have cost $150,000 and up, to allow reports to be downloadable over the Net. Basically, I was charged to come up with an alternative that enables people to get reports in a portable format."

In addition to allowing mainframe reports to be distributed over the Web as PDF e-mail attachments or from a file server that can be accessed over a LAN, WAN, or the Internet, Bob's solution also cut down on mainframe storage requirements, because PDFs can be offloaded and stored on cheap PCs. "On the mainframe, when you have 80 GB of disk, it's very expensive," he says. "And even in the AS/400 market, disk is still expensive. [OctoPDF] is a solution you can put on your charge card."

Bob said one of his biggest customers is the Congressional Budget Office, which uses OctoPDF to eliminate a small forest's worth of paper. To encourage the uptake of OctoPDF in other sectors of the government, JBM Systems is offering a free license to use OctoPDF to the first state agency in each state that requests it.

"Here's my contribution for helping with the budget cuts," Bob says. "I'm trying to make people aware. With a $500 investment, you can save tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. I'm trying to do a public service over here."

OctoPDF costs $495 for each host server it is connected to. JBM Systems is also a reseller for Brooks Internet Software's RPM. For more information, visit JBM Systems' Web site, at www.octopdf.com.