With a single focus on delivering corporate recognition award programs to the world’s largest companies, O.C. Tanner is committed to doing it right. The company’s customers range in size from very large international companies with over 200,000 employees to local firms with less than 100 employees, and are as diverse as Chevron, Nintendo, and Holland America Cruise Lines.
Headquartered in Salt Lake City, the privately held O.C. Tanner Co. was founded in 1927. Today, O.C. Tanner provides services to a majority of the Fortune 100 companies as well as to thousands of other companies in 166 countries. They handle production for both print and Web-based catalogues customized for each customer and maintain a database of 25,000 to 30,000 images.
Achieving this level of production involves moving over five Gigabytes of data a day through the company’s local and wide area networks. Previously, O.C. Tanner had been distributing those thousands of images using lots and lots of removable media. With rapid growth, and customers across the globe, O.C. Tanner needed a robust, 24/7 production workflow with zero downtime. Additionally, the company was looking for a way to make archived images available to all the production groups that need them, including print catalogue designers, Web site designers, artists, marketing, and manufacturing.
The solution: O.C. Tanner chose Xinet’s FullPress and WebNative running on Sun Microsystems Enterprise 450 servers, adding 100Base-T networking to the desktops and GigE from the server to the switch, plus Macintosh G4s for many designers.
"O.C. Tanner is experiencing a record rate of growth," explains Mark Coren, O.C. Tanner’s Mac IS Manager. "One of our biggest challenges is managing that growth smoothly, so it doesn’t impact our workflow and current customer needs. We chose FullPress because we evaluated other products and FullPress scaled the best, had the lowest management overhead, and was flexible enough to meet all of our requirements, with a lot of room for growth."
Zero system downtime is one of O.C. Tanner’s top priorities. Nonstop operation is critical for delivering work to geographically dispersed customers and production workers, and meeting tight customer deadlines. To address this requirement, the company will build redundancy into their workflow, with two identically configured Sun Microsystems Enterprise 450 servers running Xinet’s FullPress. "We just can’t afford to have any downtime," says Coren. "It costs us thousands of dollars every time weÕre down for an hour."
Another factor at the top of the list for O.C. Tanner was the increased production efficiency that comes with a move to a central server-based workflow. Previously, the designers at O.C. Tanner were organized in small workgroups, but, with thousands of images being used, shared, and stored on a disparate mix of removable media, too much time was lost searching for the right images. Coren is confident about how the system upgrade has improved productivity. "It used to be that all of the designers would be taking a 45 minute break around the color printers waiting for their jobs to come out," explains Coren. "Now they’re not getting that break because they’re not saturating the network. There’s more capacity than they’re using."
Coren reports that the centralized workflow has really speeded up their color correction process as well. Before the workflow upgrade, it would take three days from the time the photos were created in the on-site digital photography studio until the color correction operator could process them. Now, according to Coren, he’s done with everything by the end of the day. "A lot of that is due to the better organization we have," says Coren. "We know where everything is. Since everyone is working off the server, the color corrector doesn’t have to be looking for jobs others are working on. We figure that represents a 60% time savings."
Besides ensuring reliability and efficiency for the Local Area Network (LAN), the company needed a way to make archived images available to all the production groups that need them, including print catalogue designers, Website designers, marketing, and manufacturing. The company had looked at setting up NT gateways, which would have required hardware and software plus administration to the tune of $85,000. Instead, O.C. Tanner is using Xinet’s WebNative, an image management and distribution tool that extends the Local Area Network to the Web. The FullPress/WebNative combination employs the existing file structure, hardware, and software, the familiar Web browser and the existing Internet connection, creating seamless access to all production groups. The elimination of equipment purchases and the low overhead involved in implementation saved O.C. Tanner tens of thousands of dollars.
WebNative also contributes to overall productivity improvements by bringing efficiency to the data backup and restore process. O.C. Tanner added an IBM Enterprise Storage Server (ESS) RAID with 1.6 terabytes of storage backing up to an Exabyte X200, which uses 200 data cartridges and 6 tape drives to provide 12 terabytes of on-line storage. Using WebNative and the fully-integrated back-up and archival tool, FlashNet from Software Generation Ltd. (SGL), back-up, archiving and recovery tasks can now be distributed across multiple users rather than waiting to be handled only by the system administrator. This is another time and labor-saving operation that enables the company to speed turnaround for customers and increase overall capacity.
With a long-standing commitment to providing comprehensive, innovative award programs of the highest-quality, O.C. Tanner is always on the lookout for ways to improve productivity while maintaining quality and level of customer service. The FullPress/WebNative combination helps O.C. Tanner provide more customers with additional services in a shorter time frame. For O.C. Tanner and its customers, that has certainly been a formula for success
This article was last modified on June 30, 2023
This article was first published on March 1, 2000
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