Honda Siel: Steering Clear of Print Troubles

A leading player in the premium car segment of the Indian
automobile market, Honda SIEL manufactures leading brands like Accord, City,
Civic and the CR-V range in the country. With an annual installed capacity of
42,000 units, Honda Siel has comes a long way since its inception in 1997. The
company has a network of 42 exclusive authorized dealerships across India.

Operating in a highly competitive automotive segment, Honda Siel
has a range of IT applications to drive its day-to-day operations. As with any
manufacturer, the company's goal is to reduce the cost of the end product to
maintain a competitive edge in the marketplace. In sync with that, the company's
overall IT goal is to automate repetitive jobs for error proofing business
processes and to optimize IT resources.

One of these repetitive jobs is printing and Honda has put in
place a new print output infrastructure for this.

The existing print setup was unable to produce effective results
for the volume of printing that Honda required everyday. For instance, the
company uses 75 gsm papers, which were too heavy for the existing printers. As a
result, the paper would get torn or damaged. Moreover, the existing printers did
not support barcode technology. Hence, the company was forced to do manual
punching of production document information, which resulted in data errors and
other problems like slow print speeds. Therefore, the company required a print
solution that could support barcodes and high-capacity paper trays. They needed
printers that could churn out high-speed output, take heavy weight and
multi-sized paper and do duplex printing.

Honda went in for the Xerox DocuPrint 75. This is optimized for
printing transaction applications that require variable data for mission
critical documents, such as bills and invoices.

The use of Xerox printers has ushered in defined benefits and
addressed all the print-related problems the company was facing. It also
improved overall productivity levels. The output quality is good-600
dots-per-inch (dpi) laser and 600 x 1200 dpi PostScript. The DocuPrint 75 prints
75 pages per minute on 8.5 x 11" or A4 stock. Easy-to-maintain customer
replaceable fuser and toner units (CRUs) help operators keep production running
smoothly by maximizing machine uptime.

Shrikanth G



shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in