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
23 September, 2011

I wanted to talk about Windows 8 today. Despite lots of talks we had about Macs, iPads and web during...

21 October, 2016

Manufacturing companies want the data to be well organized and easy to find. However, the reality is just opposite. Data...

21 May, 2023

ChatGPT and similar tools have turned heads in several sectors, opening up new avenues of productivity, creativity, and accessibility. However,...

4 May, 2016

Many years ago, I’ve been writing applications for AutoCAD. Back in that days, AutoCAD was a starting point for engineers...

28 June, 2011

Do you know what is the most widely adopted PLM system in the world? You probably can guess based on...

13 September, 2011

I learn about SAP and Google Maps collaboration from LBZone few days ago. Navigate your browser to the the following...

8 July, 2010

Almost two months ago, I had chance to read a blog article by Mobile Beat with some intriguing name “Open...

2 June, 2009

I think that I’m not exaggerating by saying that every conversation about “collaboration” last week started from  the Google Wave...

25 May, 2012

Speak about the “cloud” in a business community and you have a chance to be slammed by “security folks”. Their...

Blogroll

To the top