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South Florida Water Management District Achieves Network Plotting success With ZEH
by: ZEH Graphic Systems, Inc.
www.zeh.com
info@zeh.com
How many times have you sent an image to a plotter and nothing happens? You carefully go through the
steps of submitting your job again, and nothing happens - again. Your frustration level increases as you ask
yourself,
"Am I doing something wrong?"
"Does anyone else have this problem?"
"There's got to be a solution out there that will fix this problem!"
Well, you need not fret any longer because the answers to your questions are:
No, you are not doing something wrong.
Yes, many organizations do have this problem.
Yes, there is a solution that will fix this problem.
Just ask the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) in West Palm Beach, Florida. SFWMD
manages the inland water resources in 16 counties of south Florida including Lake Okeechobee, the
Everglades, and the area south of Orlando. From their headquarters in West Palm Beach, Florida, they
manage 15 remote offices throughout southern Florida.
SFWMD generates a large number of GIS (Geographical Information Systems) maps that show land use,
soil types, roads, canals, topography, wetlands, and much more. Most of these maps include vector data
which is often overlaid on a raster image, resulting in very large file sizes. Whenever a remote office needed
a map, they made a request and sent their data to in-house staff at headquarters. In-house staff then would
try to best meet that request - sometimes with positive results, other times with limited results. According to
Joe Chapa, senior geographer for SFWMD, getting output from a 50-60 Mb job on their electrostatic plotters
was a 50-50 proposition at best. When a plot was produced, usually after five hours of processing, it was
subject to errors. This "solution" was not even available to remote offices; all files had to be sent into
headquarters and submitted there. As a growing government agency, SFWMD needed a plotting solution
that could handle its environment.
About three years ago, SFWMD found the solution to their problem from Zeh Graphic Systems, Inc.,
headquartered in Houston, Texas, the leader in networked output management of large-format, high quality
graphics. ZEH provided them with Plot Express, a fully integrated network plotting and queue management
system, and WebPlot, a web-based interface that allows users to view and plot their files from their web
browsers. In addition, SFWMD replaced their electrostatic plotters with Hewlett Packard's DesignJet large
format printers.
PLOTTING ENVIRONMENT
SFWMD has a large diversity of users throughout their sites. The plotting environment includes about 2,000
staff members who have access to Plot Express and can submit jobs to it. About 300 of the staff members
regularly use Plot Express, and 100 of these users are dedicated GIS staff who produce one or more plots a
day. SFWMD is a very large site of ESRI's ARCInfo and ARCView applications, and they also generate.
images from Erdas Imagine, AutoCAD, Quark, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator. The hardware
environment includes over 2,000 PCs, over 300 UNIX workstations (not to mention all the UNIX and NT
servers), and about 40 Macintoshes that are primarily used by the graphic arts group. They currently have
18 HP large-format printers, including DesignJet 755, 2500 Series, and 3500 Series, distributed among their
remote sites from Orlando to Key West.
The image to the right was created by the South Florida Water Management District using ESRI's ARC/INFO application
and output as a 290 Mb postscript file. The image was the first that SFWMD tested, and with the rasterizing
capabilities of ZEH's Plot Express, it took only a few minutes to plot rather than a few hours.
PUTTING PLOT EXPRESS TO THE TEST
When Joe and the Plotting Selection Committee started looking at different plotting software solutions, they
put ZEH's Plot Express through its paces. The very first file they tested on Plot Express was a 290 Mb
poster created from a satellite image of south-central Florida. They wanted to see if they could break Plot
Express and make it choke. It didn't. "Plot Express was able to rasterize the file in just slightly over 19
minutes, and it took about another 20 minutes to plot," states Chapa. "Needless to say, we were very
impressed that we were able to take a file of that magnitude, rasterize it, and get output in under an hour.
We wouldn't have even dreamed of attempting to plot something like that before Plot Express."
SFWMD's GIS users output images in PostScript and CGM formats. The average output file ranges in size
between 120 and 130 Mb. According to Chapa, most GIS offices do not generate file sizes that large. "We
tend to be unique in that respect, because ZEH has afforded us with the ability to create plot files regardless
of their size. We're confident that we can create the images and then actually get output from those
sources." The largest file, to date, that SFWMD has processed through Plot Express has been about 6.5
Gigabytes (Gb). They are currently developing an image file that will be slightly over 10 Gb.
About a year ago, SFWMD was given the responsibility of creating "Critical Facility Maps." These maps
are equivalent to a U.S.G.S. topo quad sheet map, but with information such as canals, control structures,
microwave towers, and anything else deemed as a critical facility or item, overlaid on top of the map. They
have 351 quad sheets that encompass their jurisdictional area. Between the draft copies and final
productions, they plotted approximately 7,000 maps, with an average file size of 80-95 Mb (and some up to
150 Mb), in under a month using only 8 plotters. Before the implementation of Plot Express, SFWMD was
generating about 50 plots a week. Today, they average between 800 - 1,000 plots a week. "We were really
limited to the capabilities of the software that we had in place at the time and also the hardware that we were
dealing with," states Chapa. "Now, because of the ZEH products and the combination of plotters, we're
finding that plotting has really become a non-issue for us. We don't even give it a second thought anymore."
WEBPLOT ALLOWS AUTONOMY AMONG USERS
"One of the things that WebPlot does is make it more ubiquitous for our users to be able to plot," says
Chapa. "WebPlot has facilitated the process that basically anybody can plot to any device or printer on our
network." With the diversity of their remote environments, that's quite an achievement.
One of the WebPlot features that SFWMD has taken full advantage of is the ability to view files prior to
printing. The professional staff works closely with the technicians to create some of the plot files that are
needed. Now, instead of creating hardcopy output and then physically sending it to a remote location for
viewing, they create the plot file electronically and then use the browser to view it online. If it meets their
approval, they can submit the file for printing to the plotters in their area. In some cases, the file is created,
analyzed, and rejected without resources being wasted on hardcopy output which saves time and money.
WebPlot has also helped SFWMD improve the way they do business. For example, a user may want to
submit a file to an output device in the planning department. They immediately see that they are fifth or
sixth in the queue. The user then looks for the output device in the regulation department, sees that there are
no jobs in the queue, moves the file over to that queue, and gets their print-out right away. "For our users to
have that kind of control, we really can't place a value on that," Chapa says. "Having one person or several
administrators to try to do the load balancing for the entire organization was a huge nightmare. Now, we've
actually empowered the users to have the functionality and capabilities that they want. It's literally changed
our philosophy and our environment on how we handle plotting."
SUPPORT ISSUES ARE NON-EXISTENT
Every quarter, SFWMD projects its supply needs based on hardware use in the various departments. The
accounting capabilities of Plot Express enables them to determine how many plots are being submitted to a
particular area and thus the amount of paper, cartridges, and toner being used. If they see a large increase in
plotting, they can make adjustments to their supply orders accordingly.
Today, in-house technical support for SFWMD is virtually nil. They used to have a full-time employee who
administered all the support functions such as loading paper, putting in the toner, calibrating the machines,
and making sure the software was functional. But, because the HP large-format printers require low
maintenance, training the staff in each department on how to change toner cartridges and load paper was an
easy "roll-over" to them. ZEH's software also gave them a lot of flexibility on how to set up the different
plotters in different areas and be able to administer the plotting environment from one location. According
to Chapa, "We used to constantly get several calls a day with respect to output that wasn't received at the
plotter, the machine's not working properly, it's miscalibrating, the lines wouldn't come up the way they
should, and the tonal balance was way off. A lot of the problems have been alleviated because of the HP
products themselves in tangent with the ZEH administration which has allowed us to really put it way on the
back burner and not even think about it anymore."
Without ZEH
Central and South Florida sites (300 users) request plots from West Palm Beach HQ. 1 server, 2 electrostatic plotters.
50 Mb+ files takes 5 hours to process and plot. 50% probability of no output or poor output quality. Output physically shipped
to remote sites.
With ZEH
ZEH's Plot Express server located at HQ. Webplot and 18 HP DesignJet printers distributed throughout southern Florida (300 users).
Users can easily access and/or process files on Plot Express server using a web browser. Users can process and plot
300 Mb+ files in less than 1 hour. Users can send a file to plot on any DesignJet accessible on their network.
CONCLUSION
What does Joe Chapa like most about the ZEH plotting solution? "The ability for me to actually submit
something and get output," he states. "We never knew if we would get output with the environment we had
before Plot Express. And, not to have to worry about that anymore is a big thing to us.
It really doesn't sound like it's that important, but something that minute has tremendously changed the
environment here, because from a technical standpoint, it's very hard for us to defend to the user community
why they can't have output. And, the fact that it gives us a lot of credibility as a support unit says, 'Hey,
look, we've listened to you, we've addressed your issues, and we now have a solution.' You can't place a
value on that."
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