CYBRA Improves MarkMagic/400 Printing Speed
Responding to marketplace demand for faster printing speeds, CYBRA Corp. (Yonkers, N.Y.), announces its newest version of MarkMagic/400 Bar Code Label Software for the AS/400. Using caching technology, Version 3.3 prints a 275-field test file more than 36 percent faster than previous releases and 73 percent on subsequent labels in a batch.
"Subsecond printing is a tremendous benefit to our customers, and we were able to improve it because of caching," says Sheldon Reich, VP of marketing for CYBRA.
Although customers can purchase MarkMagic/400 directly from CYBRA, it is also integrated into various ERP and WMS solutions, among others. "They outsource our product to provide bar-coding labeling capabilities to their products," Reich says.
According to Reich, ERP companies and other large software vendors that routinely select records to print from files with hundreds of different fields drove CYBRA to create faster printing capabilities.
Each label file has a particular number of fields in it. In the past, when a print order was placed, the label file went through each field in sequential order until they found the correct one. So, even if the field was number 297, the label file still had to sort through 296 files before getting to the proper one.
With the caching technology integrated into Version 3.3, the fields are no longer read in sequential order. Because of Smart loading technology, the label knows what to look for in advance. By storing a company's profile, the 73 percent performance increase in subsequent labels in a batch is realized.
When Kmart sends an order to be printed, for example, it has to send instructions and the data identifying their company and the customer. According to Reich, that is no longer the case, however, as MarkMagic/400 stores the company's information. Therefore, when Kmart places an order, it only has to send the customer's information, drastically cutting the response time. "Waiting three-and-a-half to four seconds was too long for our customers," Reich says. "Especially ones with hundreds of fields in each file."
-- J. Martin