A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

Google Cloud Printing, PLM and Manufacturing

Google Cloud Printing, PLM and Manufacturing
Oleg
Oleg
3 November, 2010 | 2 min for reading

What do you think about “paperless processes”. A good dream I can tell you… So, I decided to talk about paper-related stuff today. I read blog post coming from ReadWriteWeb – Cloud Print “Coming Soon” to Google Docs. I found it very interesting. Since, I’m a heavy Google Docs user, I can see myself looking for the ability to print a document “somewhere” in a different location where I’m now. In a nutshell, Google will allow to route your prints via something called “Google Cloud Print” to one of the available printers. The following passage is very interesting:

Cloud-aware printers will “soon be a reality,” says Google. However, right now, every printer in the world falls into the “legacy” category. To accomplish this, Google will use a proxy, “a small piece of software that sits on a PC where the printer is installed. The proxy takes care of registering the printer with Google Cloud Print and awaiting print jobs from the service. When a job arrives, it submits the print job to the printer using the PC operating system’s native print stack and send job status back to the printer.”

This functional capability made me think about some interesting scenarios in product development, manufacturing and supply-chain I wanted to discuss with you.

Printing in Remote Facility

When you are running development from your remote office or a different location, you might be interested to run your printer job to manufacturing or service / maintenance facilities. It can solve a problem of special applications that need to be installed and used by a person who is not trained in such a type of operation. It can decrease a potential level of mistakes and streamline processes between departments and facilities.

Field Work

I can see a possible situation when engineers or technician located in the field will need to make a print in remote office. There are multiple reasons for that started from availability of application and ending with legal or regulatory requirements.

Supply Chain

Another possible situation is when engineers from supplier and OEM organizations need to communicate between them and to delivery of hard-printed materials can be required to simplify communication. It can be related to their development processes (in case of design-supply) or other contractual or manufacturing scenarios.

What is my conclusion? We are dreaming about future paperless collaboration. However, the reality of our life often requires us to deliver prints. To increase printing capability and make it virtual and available even between organizations can be very interesting and beneficial. Do you think I’m taking a wrong direction? Can you share your “printing scenarios” or problems? Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
7 August, 2015

Aras Corp is making waves in PLM eco-system. The latest news about addition of Aibus to Aras customer list raised...

11 July, 2022

SharePLM post that started with one of my favs quotes from Leonardo Da Vinci “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” caught...

19 March, 2015

Things are moving fast these days. Vendors are speeding up their plans to catch up with new development. The changes...

1 August, 2019

Few days ago I talked about the opportunity to create a Future Proof PLMs. If you missed my article, take...

21 April, 2012

The discussion around the cloud is heating up. At the time, the competition gets stronger, the debate around the cloud...

16 September, 2010

Email is playing a significant role in the way every organization is management today. Organizations are run by emails these...

11 November, 2009

Few publications around a new company called PLM+, which left stealth mode this week, drove my attention. There is not...

10 January, 2011

Talking about App Store is not a big news nowadays. Companies in CAD, PLM and other companies in enterprise market...

8 December, 2014

To add “social” to PLM is not a simple task. I shared some of my thoughts about it here few days...

Blogroll

To the top