Shaky Box
Datatrade has developed a unique toolset for the capturing of information about printers and print strategy in the most cost effective way.
The ’Shaky Box’ is a unit that has been designed to provide an insight into the usage patterns of mission critical Impact and Thermal printers in the industrial environment.
We have found it very hard to extract pertinent information about such devices due to a range of situations such as:
- Outsourcing of DCs and operations to third party providers,
- Lack of ownership on the floor,
- Lack of reporting tools or integrated network structures to support them
- An understandable reluctance to add monitoring software onto live mission critical hosts
Simple and cost effective
We have found the Shaky Box is a simple and cost effective way of gathering usage information and patterns that help us feed back to the customer recommendations on such issues as:
- Rights printers for the right job – i.e. speeds and feeds,
- Usage patterns for built-in redundancy, overflow,
- Cost reduction exercises,
- Printer rotation for life extension,
- Better understanding of the business and operational issues.
The Shaky Box is a non-invasive piece of hardware that requires no software installation on any networks, or any other requirements from the customer. The printer is also not changed, modified or tampered with in any way.
Example Printer Availability Analysis
The following example shows the availability requirement for the printer
Example Printer Usage Analysis
The following picture shows a frequency pattern. From this data we can get an understanding of how heavily the printer is being used and when.
