Sawtek, Mfg/Pro ERP, txt2pdf

June 18, 1999 - Reading time: 2 minutes

Sawtek has used "txt2pdf" with its Mfg/Pro ERP software system to send any report via email as a PDF attachment. There were minor modifications to the Mfg/Pro system to enable the email capability, however once that was in place there were no other modification required to utilize "txt2pdf". Since Mfg/Pro allows you to define a printer as a "pipe" it was very easy to setup a "printer" that converted the report to PDF, uuencoded it, then mailed it to the user all in one statement. Sawtek chose to use the PDF format rather than an ASCII attachment because it is much easier for the user to view and print the report since the formatting and pagination are retained. This allows any recipient with Acrobat Reader to view and/or print the report. Sawtek will use this feature for both internal employees and to send reports to customers and suppliers. Sawtek plans to switch nearly all of its scheduled automated reports(which had to be sorted and distributed by hand) from paper output to email. This will provide significant cost savings when it becomes fully implemented.

In the Netherlands an academic hospital uses txt2pdf to send printer output via e-mail as PDF-messages in real time. Data sent include results of blood samples, drug orders from the various departments and accounting information. Prior to txt2pdf this information was printed at the central computer department. The project manager states:
"One could say that Txt2pdf results in a fast supply of information with limited resources. For the hospital the fact that in response to information received, actions are taken swiftly is of importancy. With Txt2pdf and the intranet, decision time is reduced by almost a day for certain information. A favourable side effect is a cut back in direct and indirect printing costs. What makes the program really great? Its portability to other OS's and the portability of the format - PDF - it produces. Moreover we did not have to change a single line of code of the data delivering systems."