In September of 1969, the first Cracker Barrel store opened just outside Nashville, Tennessee. Since then, Cracker Barrel has consistently provided its customers with high quality home cooked meals, friendly service and a variety of rural American merchandise.

Currently, Cracker Barrel maintains over 400 stores in 36 states in the US, and employs a staff of nearly 40,000.

Cracker Barrel's printing division handles a number of different responsibilities. These responsibilities vary from the production and printing of gift certificates to large, high resolution banners.

The environment is centred around an IBM AS/400 with Xerox 4050 production laser printers. This case study discusses Cracker Barrel's intent to upgrade the Xerox 4050's to newer Xerox DP65's.

When Cracker Barrel decided it was time to upgrade their Xerox 4050 production printers, Mike Mullins, Director of Enterprise Operations at Cracker Barrel, made it clear to the Xerox team that he wanted a seamless conversion to the new Xerox DP65 printers.

He wanted to retain all of Cracker Barrel's current processes and applications, avoiding any disruptions that could jeopardise the integrity of the existing environment during the transformation.

Xerox immediately turned to Out-Put Solutions Inc. for help. Paris, a suite of software from XLPrint Software and distributed by Out-Put Solutions, provides its users with a simple turnkey solution for converting existing processes and applications into printer independent resources.

For Cracker Barrel, this meant seamless transformation from the older Xerox 4050 printers to the newer DP65's.

This was critical because the Xerox DP65 is not able to print applications that are designed to run on the older 4050.

Paris' Designer module also enabled Cracker Barrel to easily create and manipulate electronic forms and complete documents in a WYSIWYG Windows environment.

Through the use of Paris, Cracker Barrel was able to seamlessly upgrade to more modern Xerox production printers.

The conversion capabilities of the Paris solution allowed for minimal disruption to Cracker Barrel's IT environment while the Paris Design module offered additional functionality not available using the older Xerox printing method. Benefits of the Paris solution include:

		Interactive application development
		Conversion of Xerox 4050 resources to enable them in a PostScript printing environment
		Reduced cost of printing
		Retention of existing host system methods

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.