Target Markets And Applications

All operators working in a front office environment know how important it is to concentrate on the customer (high value activity) while the IT equipment takes care of most of their routine tasks without problems.

The Compuprint MDP 40 family is the ideal answer for all the organisations whose success depends on interactions and transactions with their customer at the counter.

In the following we have described the printing needs at the front office of some of these organisations.

Banks and Financial Institutions

The reference market for this type of printer is the bank front counter environment.

The peripheral designed for this environment must be capable of quickly and silently providing high quality printing on single or multicopy forms, statements, cheques and passbooks. In banking applications, the printer processes a wide range of pre-printed forms and documents for opening new accounts, handling loan applications and many other functions.

In the bank branches there is a clear need for printing on special media with minimum operator intervention.

Today the banking operators have to concentrate on high value activities (dealing with customers) without paying extra attention to routine tasks (e.g. printing).

Post Offices

The ability to integrate several functions in the same peripheral - small foot-print, low noise, high print quality, high throughput and ease of use - is a requirement of modern Post-office applications.

In Post offices, the following activities are usually carried out:

handling of savings books that are very similar to banking passbooks (in some countries still handled manually)

printing on single or multicopy forms

utility payments

Post Offices need an IT system able to combine the traditional high volume printing activities with an innovative automatic management of any bills payment to enhance the quality of service for their customers.

Public Administration

In the front-office environment of public administration offices the following activities are usually carried out

printing on personal identification cards and passports

car documents

A world-wide trend is showing the migration of activities - such as car documents management - from a central department towards the peripheral offices of the Public Administration.

This trend is opening a new wide market for specialised printers able to handle many different Public Administration document formats.

Manufacturing

A new class of emerging application for specialised printers is in the manufacturing market. A process of world-wide quality improvement to increase the assembling processes in terms of speed, accuracy and reduction of mistakes is the main theme.

Very often factory automation activity involves IT equipment. Printers in these systems must be robust and reliable, able to manage special media, including special features like bar code printing, optical mark reading and low cost of ownership.

Travel Agencies

Travel agencies are a traditional market for front-office printers. This area need to print on tickets characterised by variable thickness and size. Very often in these branches you can still find several impact printers used to print on all the different type of ticket: train, ship, bus. Impact printers are still widely used also for airline tickets (TAT) even if the trend is to print immediately the boarding pass with a new specific standard identified as ATB (thermal printing and magnetic stripe). Specialised front-office printers are also needed for reservation documents and travel instructions.

Health Care

Hospitals, laboratories, doctor's offices and many other health care departments have reception desks where the operators have to deal with citizens for important and sensitive reasons.

This is a typical area where the operators have to concentrate carefully on the client and not on the activity to minimise / remove potential errors.

Printing needs are automatic alignment, low noise and handling of different media including invoices, fanfold and stickers to be applied on test tubes of blood. The reception desks of health care organisations have many different forms and therefore optical mark reading is appreciated to recognise the correct form has been introduced into the printer.