Unarco is one of the largest producers of storage rack and order picking systems in the United States.The company has been a leader in the material handling business for forty years. Unarco was purchased by the Renco Group in the Spring of 1995.

Unarco were using an in-house developed proprietary system. This system used IBM AS/400 and S370 systems.

Whilst this has served them well, it was not Year 2000 compliant, so the company needed to decide whether to invest in keeping the old system going, or to start afresh.

The decision was to start afresh with new hardware and software. The new software solution was a package called Dataflow, and ERP product from Dataworks Corp. This new software also shifted the emphasis of the hardware since it was a PC based client-server architecture running under Windows NT.

While Dataworks provided an essentially turnkey system, the IS group at Unarco spent a year laying the groundwork for the customisation of the ERP package.

It was during this period that Unarco decided that the new system needed more output capability than Dataflow could deliver.

After evaluating several solutions, including large printers with built in forms packages, Unarco settled on Paris as their chosen option.

Brad Banyas, President of Out-Put Solutions Inc. who are distributors of

Paris software in the US, said "When Unarco contacted us, I was sure we could greatly increase their output options by using a suite of document formatting and distribution applications called Paris".

The Paris software suite processes documents in ASCII, EBCDIC and Xerox "DJDE" formats. Documents can be formatted online and output to any networked printer. Unarco chose two Konica Force 50 Printers for production printing.

Rick Benton, IS Director at Unarco says "Paris provided the flexibility we needed. And it's nice to find something that simply slides right into place and works well from both input and output sides."

Because Paris was able to integrate data and formatting (including graphics and barcodes), Unarco is eliminating all its pre-printed forms throughout the company - with the exception of letterhead. Savings in printing costs is contributing significantly to the company's anticipated two-year payback for the new IS system.

Paris is a powerful document design, distribution and retrieval system that enables you to effortlessly create attractive and informative documents from your existing printstream data. Integrated with complimentary products, Paris can then distribute those documents anywhere via print, fax, email and archive.

For more information about Paris and other Output Management Solutions and Services, please email us at info@outputpeople.com or click on the "request info" icon at the top of this page.