Usage scenario for storing documents to satisfy requests for reprints

In this scenario, a commercial printer prints and mails account statements for a bank once a month. When customers request reprints of their bank statements, the bank wants the commercial printer to satisfy those requests for up to four years after the statements are printed. The bank also wants to save the production history for jobs that are stored, so they can confirm that those statements were printed when the original job was processed.

Currently the commercial printer runs 500 jobs a day and uses a RetainCompletedJobs step in the workflow to retain jobs for three days. Retaining the jobs longer than three days would make jobs difficult to find in the Jobs table and might cause performance issues with the print production system. For example, if the commercial printer retained jobs for three months, the Jobs table would have 45,000 jobs.

An administrator at the commercial printer creates a repository with a retention period of four years. The administrator then defines a history record notification object that records job state information whenever the Current job state property changes to Complete. Then to minimize the number of notifications that are recorded, he sets a condition so the history record is only saved when the Current step equals PrintJobs.

The administrator adds a step based on the StoreInRepository step template after the PrintJobs step in the PDF print workflow, but before the RetainCompletedJobs step, and saves the print file. The administrator specifies both job and document properties in the StoreInRepository step. The job properties are Customer name, Custom 2 (which stores the cycle date), Time submitted, and Workflow. The document properties are Verification recipient, Account number, and Postal code. The Administrator also sets the Store history records property to Yes. The commercial printer’s staff can use any combination of the job and document properties to search for and retrieve documents and information about their processing history.

The pre-press department uses RICOH ProcessDirector Plug-in for Adobe Acrobat to identify documents in a PDF file and define the document properties. The staff then submits the job to the PDF print workflow.

When the job completes the StoreInRepository step, the job and its print completion timestamp are stored in the repository. Three days after the job is run, it is deleted from the Jobs table.

In August 2014, eight months after a job is run, the commercial printer receives a request from the bank to reprint a document with Account Number 1122345687. The print department supervisor searches the repository for a document with a value of DEC2013 for the Custom 2 job property and a value of 112234568 for the Account number document property. The Results table lists the document that matches those property values.

The supervisor displays the detailed information about the document. On the History tab, he confirms that the document found is the correct document. He then submits the statement to a reprint workflow that only has steps related to printing.