Royal Crown Derby

 

“The Royal Crown Derby Porcelain Company is a privately owned Limited Company. The Company produces bone china tableware, giftware and collectables, for sale primarily in china and glass retailers and department stores, both in the UK and overseas.
The present factory was established in 1878 but the business traces its origins to the original factory which was set up in Nottingham Road in about 1750. Queen Victoria granted permission to include the title “Royal” in the company name in 1890.
Royal Crown Derby produces invitation cards to its 12,000 guild members for many of the new product launches and events held by both Royal Crown Derby and its customers. For many years the invitations were outsourced. As part of a cost reduction exercise and to add more flexibility in the production of the invitations, the printing of the invitation cards was brought in house.
The invitations were firstly produced on a HP Laserjet4000N using the drop down letter tray. This proved to be a bad move by the Sales and Marketing department who were unaware of the approximately 50 card capacity limit. On an average run of 3000 invitations the whole print run could take days, with a member of staff having to hand load the cards.
The IT department was tasked with finding a cost effective printer solution to enable the invitation cards to be printed. Xerox came up with a solution using the DC420. Unfortunately the card thickness was on the limit the DC420 could handle and the high ended tolerance cards would jam.
For two years many suppliers were contacted and many promises of a solution were made, but unfortunately all test failed due to the thickness of the card.
Until Roger from Kira Supplies came back with a solution using the Kyocera 3800N machine with is 1000 sheet front loader and rear sheet stacker unit. Trials were put in place to ensure the machine could handle the card thickness and went well.
The machine was purchased and the solution has reduced the costs of production by 50% per invitation. A Standard print run of 3000 invitations now only takes a matter of hours rather than days. The flexibility and speed of the printer also means other literature can also produced on this printer. The printer can be loaded left to print overnight and as yet we have not suffered a single jam in just under twelve months. We are totally satisfied with the printer and wish only the solution was found 2 years ago.”
Mr. D Lightfoot
IT Manager
Royal Crown Derby

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Oriel High School

Introduction to the MiniFrameUK SoftXpand deployment by Mark Woolner, Network Manager Oriel Specialist Mathematics and Computing College

The Team

Oriel Specialist Mathematics and Computing College is a forward thinking dynamic secondary learning establishment which benefits from a positive leadership team focused on delivering “Excellence in Learning” with an “Every Child Matters” attitude. It‘s a community minded establishment that stays active well into the evening (the site manager can often be seen locking up around 10 pm.)

The Challenge

When I first started back in November 2007, I saw the all too familiar 25 – 30 beige boxes, crammed into a room, with a mismatch of CRT monitors perched on-top of the PCs to allow just enough room for an almost complete QWERTY keyboard and ‘rugby balled’ ball mouse. With each station pumping out around 1KW of heat, the central heating was surplus to requirements.

The Attitude

The College has had to deal with a legacy of “mend and make do” which resulted in the catch 22 situation of poor quality PC’s leading to a poor attitude towards PC’s. The heavy handed use by students had left its mark and staff came to expect issues when using ICT. “Do Not Use” and “Out Of Order” signs were seen too many times!

Playing catch up
I first worked at the school for 2 days a week, which meant I was always playing catch-up with a lot of time spent investigating faults caused by students either “sticking things IN” ( pens, paper, sandwiches) or “taking things OUT” (network, monitor & power cables along with CD drive belts). The network would often be taken down because a student, unable to see through the spaghetti junction of wiring, had inadvertently caused a loop back by plugging a network cable into two network points!

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