Sally Salon Services Ltd

Sally Salon Services Ltd is a very successful global company, originating in the USA. Sally Salon Services Ltd now has branches across the US, Europe and Japan. As a major supplier for the beauty industry communications are vitally important across all three continents.

Every day Sally Salon Services Ltd receives a continuous stream of communications ranging from orders & remittances to general faxes and email. Depending upon the communication type there are a number of different locations each document may need to be forwarded to.

In order to provide a quick and efficient service for their clients it is necessary for Sally to ensure that the documentation is processed quickly and effectively by the correct department.

Sally had an IBM System i (AS400) running Fax400 to facilitate the distribution of fax documents. The termination of support for the Fax400 product prompted Sally to look into other solutions. Although they found many alternatives the majority they investigated would require additional hardware. This would be costly not only in terms of the hardware but also in the time to deployment and training of the users.

SpaceTec, a leading supplier of IBM System i (AS400) products and service was brought in to discuss Sallys' requirements. SpaceTec are the UK's only distributor of the Blue Series solutions and as such have many customers with similar issues to Sally. SpaceTec recommended the Blue Fax and Blue Mail applications.

These solutions would enable Sally to continue utilising the IBM System i (AS400) whilst also offering additional functionality.

Blue Fax is a native, turnkey fax solution for the IBM System i (AS400) that supports sending, receiving and printing of fax documents. It enables Sally to send faxes directly from the IBM System i (AS400) spool file or from any word processing software on any attached PC. Sally is able to set up Blue Fax so that it will automatically distribute faxes to any number of predetermined locations. This together with Blue Mail a similar application for email ensures that Sally is able to communicate all requests quickly to the correct departments or locations.

Blue Mail works by distributing SCS or AFP prints as email. The image is sent as a PDF or TIFF attachment. The graphics remain exactly the same regardless of the output format. Sally can work with all types of spool data and send documents such as invoice or purchase orders as e-mail.

Sally were able to deploy the Blue Series applications within one day with no disruption to their end users.

Colin Harris MIS project Manager for Sally said "The Blue Fax has proved to be a stable and reliable solution. Monitoring of the faxes is fairly intuitive and as most functionality is automatic the users find they need to interface with the system very little. It is now much simpler to set up new applications. For example when we set up the system to fax Remittance Advices, the whole task only took a few hours at the most. The Blue Mail module has proved indispensable as we have been able to use it as a back up system when communications with the warehouse system were lost. It was easy to set up Blue Mail to email all orders and critical reports to an alternative Email address allowing business to continue as usual."

Sometime after installing the Blue Series solutions Sally were up against another problem. They were utilising a print application to convert IPDS output to PCL5. Although the application was working fine and producing the required results the problem arose when Sally realised their need for more licenses. Purchasing the extra licenses was to prove very costly. Sally is expanding at a very quick rate and they could see that the ongoing cost of new licenses could mount up very quickly. Due to the success of the Blue Series application Sally turned to SpaceTec once again to discuss alternative print management solutions. SpaceTec made a recommendation to switch their existing products to Interform400. Interform400 which is licensed per IBM System i (AS400) as opposed to per user, would offer the same results as their current product together with additional benefits. This would allow Sally to expand without the worry of continuously buying extra licenses.

InterForm400 handles the entire print workflow of Sally's IBM System i (AS400) without any requirement for re-programming their print applications. Forms are automatically selected based on print data or spool attributes, and distributed to any PCL5 compatible printer in their network. Interform400 also offers the ability to create the documents in PDF format and includes a zip feature so these documents can be emailed to external users. Another module used by Sally is the ZPL handler allowing the printing of bar codes on their desktop Zebra Printers. This module has saved Sally money and time as the new printers are more reliable and have a lower cost of ownership.

Patrick Race of SpaceTec said "The Blue Series and InterForm400 Products are both easy to deploy and configure, we find that most companies require little or no training. As both products are modular, companies can install just the components necessary with the knowledge that they can make additions in the future. Sally are fairly typical in their approach to purchasing applications for the IBM System i (AS400) most of our customers start with a base module and find at a later date they have a need for additional tools"


About Sally

Sally Salon Services Ltd Inc. is the world's largest distributor of professional beauty supplies. The company has 3,000 stores in the U.S., Puerto Rico, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Mexico and Japan. For further information, visit www.sallybeauty.com or call 1-800- ASK-SALLY for store location information