From small companies to large-scale industries, printers play an indispensable role in meeting diverse business needs. The printing requirements of clients vary across sectors, which means printer manufacturers must stay up-to-date with market changes, anticipate industry needs, and incorporate cutting-edge technology into their products.
A leading US-based manufacturer of printers and cartridges caters to businesses of all sizes, from individuals to organizations with monthly printing outputs ranging from 2,500 to 10,000 pages. For large-scale enterprises, the company offers advanced, high-capacity devices designed to handle large printing demands.
The company ensures superior image quality by offering genuine supplies and has earned the trust of clients around the globe. This case study focuses on how the company overcame network bottlenecks, enabling it to advance its manufacturing operations seamlessly, reducing the mean-time-to-repair (MTTR), ensuring proper time-to-market, and the delivery of high-quality end-user products.
Involving multiple phases and closely monitored procedures, the company's printer manufacturing process utilizes precision-focused applications to ensure efficiency and product quality. These tools provide visibility into the production line, enabling proactive issue detection and optimal performance. To manage and track progress across different phases, the company relies on Wonderware software, a robust manufacturing execution system (MES) hosted on servers.
The MES system enables the manufacturer to track work order execution based on detailed specifications. It records real-time processes and raises alerts, allowing the manufacturer to identify bottlenecks or potential issues proactively and maintain seamless operations across the production line.
The first phase, prototyping, uses design and simulation tools for rapid prototyping, testing, and real-time feedback on functionality. Once the prototype is finalized, the next phase is component manufacturing. Here, the company leverages an inventory management system to monitor the supply of parts and manage logistics efficiently.
During the assembly phase, various applications guide shop workers through each step of the process, which includes tasks such as ink mixing, cartridge assembly, and printer head installation. At the same time, the products are monitored for quality to discover any defects during assembly. After the assembly, the printers move on to packaging and distribution.
From start to finish, the MES system plays an indispensable role in ensuring a seamless manufacturing process. So, the health and performance of the IT systems must be continuously monitored to ensure the entire operation continues free of disruptions.
The company's IT infrastructure encompassing servers, virtual machines, databases, containers, and web-based applications is the backbone of the production process.
Servers collect and store all the production and quality control data generated throughout the manufacturing process. The applications are integral to the company's MES, which tracks everything from inventory management to quality control, packaging, and delivery. Nearly 400 employees rely on these applications for their daily tasks, making their performance critical seamless manufacturing.
In addition to monitoring the applications, it's also essential for the manufacturer to keep a close eye on network devices such as switches and routers, which are responsible for facilitating bandwidth connections.
The hardware devices placed in appropriate places in the assembly line also should be monitored, such as sensors that monitor temperature, pressure, flow rate, and effect the cooling systems. Any malfunction could directly impact the final product's quality.
With multiple manufacturing sites across the US, Mexico, Poland, and China, the company utilizes ManageEngine Applications Manager to monitor server performance at data centers and track the progress of manufacturing across these global locations. Any disruption to these critical applications can have severe consequences, including production delays, missed deadlines, and skipped quality checks. In turn, this could lead to an increase in defective printers, raising repair costs and damaging the company's reputation.
Given the importance of these systems, maintaining the performance of these applications is essential to ensuring both the efficiency and the quality of production. We spoke with a support engineer at the company who highlighted the critical role that applications play in their manufacturing and business operations.
He shared valuable insights into how the company overcame the challenges faced before investing in ManageEngine Applications Manager, and ultimately streamlining their processes and enhancing overall performance with the solution.
In its search for a suitable solution, the company evaluated multiple prominent vendors, including PRTG, for its application monitoring needs. Ultimately, it chose ManageEngine Applications Manager for the extensive set of features it provides at an affordable price.
The company was already using ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus and was very satisfied with both its performance and the support experience. So, this previous positive experience with ManageEngine influenced its decision to select Applications Manager.
The IT team at the organization leveraged the comprehensive capabilities of ManageEngine Applications Manager to ensure its manufacturing process was seamless and apps and servers were operating around-the-clock.
The support engineer shared that ManageEngine Applications Manager enabled the IT team to monitor the entire application stack from a single, unified console—including servers, databases, and application performance.
The APM Insight Agent deployed on the servers collects log data and sends it to ManageEngine Applications Manager, where the IT team gains in-depth information on key performance metrics. The support engineer pointed out that this data was invaluable for troubleshooting and improving performance across the infrastructure.
ManageEngine Applications Manager's database monitoring feature enabled the IT team to identify slow-running queries that were negatively affecting application performance. By pinpointing these issues, it could optimize queries for greater efficiency, ensuring smoother operations.
The support engineer also highlighted that hardware-related issues or resource constraints on the server side could also impact application performance. With ManageEngine Applications Manager, the IT team could monitor vital server performance metrics, such as CPU utilization and disk utilization. These insights allowed it to understand server load, assess memory utilization, and optimize resources to maintain peak performance.
By tracking network parameters such as traffic, utilization, and the number of packets sent/received across network interfaces, the IT team was also able to gauge the load on servers. This comprehensive monitoring helped it ensure that all systems were running efficiently, minimizing disruptions and enhancing overall productivity.
Hardware issues and resource constraints were affecting our application performance, but with ManageEngine Applications Manager, we monitored key metrics like CPU and disk utilization and ensured optimal performance.
With real-time alerts, the manufacturer was able to quickly detect performance issues and prevent application downtime. The IT team could configure thresholds for individual metrics, ensuring it was instantly notified whenever a threshold was breached.
The severity classifications—Critical, Warning, and Clear—helped the IT team assess the seriousness of the issue, enabling it to prioritize issues and take corrective actions promptly.
The manufacturer has hundreds of employees across multiple sites who rely on MES-dependent applications to track the manufacturing process. If the application responds slowly or fails to capture the process accurately, it can cause confusion and hinder productivity. Given the mission-critical nature of these applications, the manufacturer needed a way to assess their performance in terms of end-user experience, ensuring that employees could access a fully operational application interface 24/7.
To achieve this, the printer manufacturer leverages the Application Performance Index (APDEX) score, which provides a clear measurement of user satisfaction. The APDEX score uses data collected over time to create a simple index based on the application's responsiveness. Measured on a scale from 0 to 1, the score allows the IT team to gauge how well the application is performing and, most importantly, to ensure that its mission-critical apps remain up and running smoothly, meeting user expectations.
The APDEX score is an invaluable feature that provides insight into application performance from the end user's perspective, helping us ensure our critical apps run optimally.
Since the manufacturer was already using ServiceDesk Plus, investing in ManageEngine Applications Manager proved highly beneficial, as the two tools integrate seamlessly. The support engineer explained that this integration allowed the IT team to automate the process of categorizing, prioritizing, and assigning tickets to technicians directly from within Applications Manager.
When an alarm is triggered in Applications Manager due to a threshold violation, it automatically creates a ticket in ServiceDesk Plus, enabling technicians to address the issue immediately.
By utilizing ManageEngine Applications Manager and, the printer manufacturer has realized several key financial and performance benefits outlined below.
The threshold-based alert notifications in ManageEngine Applications Manager have been a game-changer for the IT team, enabling it to proactively address critical metrics such as response time, memory consumption, data throughput, and slow queries—ultimately preventing application failures.
The support engineer emphasized that, in the past, without these alerts, the team often missed issues that led to complete application crashes. These outages not only disrupted operations but also halted the manufacturing process, leading to significant revenue loss.
With Applications Manager, the IT team can now identify and address potential issues before they escalate into outages. An application failure can have a direct impact on the printer manufacturer's production environment, leading to delays in the assembly process or potentially impacting key steps, both of which can severely affect output.
As a result of enhanced visibility and early issue detection, the company estimates saves $50,000 annually in downtime costs alone.
By proactively monitoring the entire application stack—from servers and databases to application performance—the IT team was able to identify and resolve issues before they impacted production.
This proactive approach has enabled the IT team to shift focus to more meaningful and strategic initiatives, significantly improving overall productivity. The support engineer estimates that the IT team now saves nearly 100 hours annually, time that would have otherwise been spent on manual troubleshooting and issue resolution.
The support engineer explained how the company's investment in ManageEngine Applications Manager greatly accelerated the troubleshooting process. With centralized visibility, the IT team now monitors all servers, applications, and databases from a single console.
This unified view empowers the IT team to quickly correlate issues, streamline problem identification and resolution, and effectively slash the total time for MTTR by a significant 40%.
ManageEngine Applications Manager is application performance monitoring software that helps businesses ensure high availability and performance for their critical applications and servers, both within the data center and in the cloud. It provides real-time insights into the performance of complex applications, their underlying infrastructure and the experience of users—all from a single pane of glass. Enterprises worldwide trust Applications Manager to improve their operational performance, support digital transformation initiatives and improve customer engagement without being hampered by performance challenges. For more information about Applications Manager, visit manageengine.com/apm
It allows us to track crucial metrics such as response times, resource utilization, error rates, and transaction performance. The real-time monitoring alerts promptly notify us of any issues or anomalies, enabling us to take immediate action.
Reviewer Role: Research and Development
Tech Support Manager, Lexmark