Highly skilled graphics staff can select print jobs to meet production schedules without 24 hour professional supervision.

Client uses a highly specialized software and hardware system to process and print large photographic prints to fill customer orders. Each print job, which can run up to four hours, requires a dedicated workstation and manual intervention before and after the print run. The customer had to deliver special training for staff in how to manage the enormous disk space required by the finished graphic image files; thus, the client had to schedule one of these specially trained employees to handle the start and completion of each job.

Allegro designed and created a series of programs and a simple database system to allow print jobs to be entered, prioritized, stored, and scheduled. Now the client can enter large, multiple-hour print jobs many weeks in advance into the system. The new programs allow priority changes, printing and processing time estimates, and inventory reports on materials needed to complete the physical printing run. By being able to operate the plotter in 24-hour mode, the business can achieve the highest possible return on its expensive hardware and software investment.

Graphics specialists who create the original art or respond to customer orders can set printing schedules from their own machines now without the very expensive hardware and software combination that actually processes the print job. Their printing schedules are processed in real-time by a dedicated PC, equipped with the specialized hardware and software combination. This dedicated PC creates the commands to pass to the custom software, processes the jobs, then stores the finished images or cleans up the temporary disk area, depending on the future need for that image.