NASA Finds Down-to-Earth Savings

Electronic publishing and print-on-demand systems have helped NASA bring about a quantum leap in the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of its information dissemination.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) looms large in our national consciousness. Here is the agency that has defined for Americans—if not for all humanity—what is humanly possible, with the phrase: "If we can put a man on the moon..."

Yet to think of NASA as simply the space agency is to misunderstand its mission. NASA is all about rocket science; but the word to emphasize is science. The purpose of rockets is to better understand the vast and mysterious universe our world inhabits, and to gain new insights that can benefit the consumer, support industry, advance the practice of medicine, and protect our planet's atmosphere.

NASA's astronauts are the Columbuses and Megellans of today, seeking riches—not of gold, but of knowledge. Indeed, NASA is the ultimate knowledge-driven organization. NASA's basic mission might be summarized very simply: gain new knowledge from space, then get it to people who can use it.

The printed word figures very prominently in NASA's effort to carry out both of these mandates. A family of electronic publishing and print-on-demand systems has helped NASA bring about a quantum leap in the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of its information dissemination. The electronic publishing and print-on-demand systems combine document reproduction, revision, storage and transmission into one seamless operation.

Each NASA field center prints documents from a Xerox DocuTech 6135 printer, which can print on many different paper sizes at 135 pages-per-minute. Each center has two Sun Microsystems Ultra-2 processors and 256M of main memory. A 2G hard drive stores documents waiting to be printed. The system can accept files to print from most Microsoft Windows, Macintosh and Unix programs. And it can be hooked right into an office's Novell network or to a TCP/IP or EtherTalk connection.

From Offset To Digital

NASA has shifted a great deal of its print work from offset printing to a network of electronic digital systems that allows digital distribution of documents and print-on-demand. In so doing, NASA has cited efficiency improvements of up to 90 percent, and cost savings in the million of dollars. The use of intranets and the Internet to distribute NASA information, with only necessary items printed on-demand, has dramatically reduced costs.

NASA generates extremely high volumes of documents. Every maneuver in space, every bolt on every spacecraft has a counter in the form of stacks of drawings, technical descriptions and engineering memoranda. Every such document goes through many iterations and passes through many hands.

Beyond the documents pertaining to NASA's core activity of space exploration, there are countless papers related to running a large and extremely complex organization. These documents include research reports, policy directives, memoranda, vacancy announcements, bulletins, invitations for bids and proposals, news releases, forms, conference minutes, budgets, printed circuit negatives and photographic prints. The Division Manager of Logistics and Technical Information at Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, one of NASA's 10 field installations calculates that his installation alone annually generates a stack of documents higher than Mount Everest.

A Better Alternative

The stack of document proved to be as conspicuous as it was tall. When, several years ago, the new NASA printing management officer toured the Agency looking ways to improve efficiency, the order quickly came: find a better way to produce all those documents.

Dick Tuey didn't need persuading. As Resources Manager at NASA's Washington Headquarters, he already had come to the conclusion that NASA's nine scattered offset printing facilities were no longer a practical way to handle the bulk of the Agency's printing needs. He recognized that the challenge was to find an efficient, high-quality alternative to offset printing.

Tuey enlisted me, Printing Management Officer Fred Moore, as his ally. I previously had held a similar position with the U.S. Marine Corps. Together, we were able to bring about a wholesale transformation of printing and duplicating throughout the entire NASA organization.

Tuey and I began by analyzing the situation thoroughly and systematically. The result was a 168-page NASA Technical Memorandum that made the case for conversion to an electronic publishing system.

In this study, Tuey cited specific qualities NASA would need in its electronic publishing and print-on-demand system: the ability to work within NASA communications networks; the ability to receive electronic files in at least two standard formats (PCL and PostScript); the ability to print these files at 90 pages per minute or faster; the ability to collate and staple the duplicated product; and the ability to store duplicated files for later reproduction.

Beyond these specific criteria, we shared a broader vision of a system that took the greatest possible advantage of the power of modern electronics. In our vision, NASA would migrate to a system that, on the local level, allowed printing-on-demand and, on the national level, achieved full digital networking capabilities among NASA's nine far-flung printing and duplicating facilities. All of these criteria helped us quickly narrow the field of potential suppliers.

We decided to put the two top digital printing equipment suppliers to a test. In a 90-day benchmarking exercise at NASA's Lewis Research Center, in Cleveland, Ohio, we arranged that each rival duplicating system—using its own scanner, printer, media server, finisher and binder—would process an identical stack of documents from the center's normal printing workload.

Both systems performed well, Tuey later wrote, but one electronic publishing and print-on-demand system, the Xerox DocuTech, scored higher in a number of specific areas. With 600-dot-per-inch resolution—four times that of its competitor—the output quality of this electronic publishing and print-on-demand system was noticeably better, Tuey reported, adding that this system rated higher in reproduction of photographs.

Plus, with three paper-supply bins to the rival's two, this system gave NASA more flexibility for inserting extra sheets such as covers, divider pages or different-sized paper. A clinching difference was a Signature Booklet Maker, an optional finisher made by C.P. Bourg that is built into the machine. It produces 11x17˝ signatures. This networked system, Tuey summarized, was the system that met the duplicating requirements in terms of output quality, and system flexibility.

Yet even the proven superiority of this system did not precipitate a mass order of systems by NASA. Rather , the Agency still left the individual purchasing decisions up to its semi-autonomous field installations, each of which decided to conduct its own benchmarking tests of this system to see if it passed muster. Tuey and Moore traveled from center to center to demonstrate the DocuTech's capabilities and won approval from every one of them.

Print-on-demand Eliminates Stocking

Thus began a gradual NASA deployment of the DocuTech. Currently, NASA runs 23 of them. The effects of their arrival on the scene were immediate and powerful: print-on-demand had arrived. Now people throughout the Agency could feed documents into the electronic publishing print-on-demand digital memory and then print them as needed. Suddenly the Agency's practice of stockpiling documents was obsolete.

Not only could the electronic publishing and print-on-demand system store documents digitally, it let people revise them at will, using the system's editing features. For an Agency accustomed to subjecting its work products to constant revision and refinement, this capability proved invaluable.

For example, the manuals that NASA's astronauts routinely take along on their missions are living, dynamic documents that change all the time, since NASA learns new things from every mission. Now NASA can update them electronically, directly through the DocuTech.

The astronauts in-flight manuals became an early example of another crucial system advantage: the power of networking. Prior to the arrival of the electronic publishing print-on-demand system, NASA would produce the in-flight manuals at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, on offset printing equipment and then load them on a plane for delivery to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Now, we write them in Texas and transmit them electronically for printing on the DocuTech in Florida. About 65 percent of all print work now arrives over the network.

Networking, on the local level, means connection to each NASA field center's LAN. The Agency is gaining these networking advantages on a national scale as well.

Already, NASA is transmitting 59 percent of its technical reports to the field centers electronically, and by the end of this year the Agency will distribute all such reports in this manner. Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), in Greenbelt, Md., is the repository for Agency forms. Field centers will come in electronically to GSFC for the form that they need and download it for electronic print-on-demand at their centers, thus eliminating the handling, mailing and warehousing of these documents.

Major Cost Savings

One net effect of the electronic publishing and print-on-demand system and networking capabilities is, as Tuey puts it, "to save all kinds of Money." How much will NASA save? Life cycle cost analysis (over a five-year period) reveals that the systems will bring about a cost reduction of over $51.9 million. After subtracting the equipment costs of about $6.7 million, this leaves a net savings of more than $45 million for NASA.

Calculated by Tuey and Moore in precise, careful detail, the savings come from faster production plus the elimination of labor, storage, distribution, storage and disposal of hazardous chemicals, mailing, obsolescence management and handling costs that would have been inevitable under the old system.

Productivity Gains

Very significant gains in productivity have already been seen. Turnaround time has been cut from weeks to days, and from days to hours. For example, production of one NASA book previously took up to 46 hours; it now takes 12 hours. Another book that took 203 hours to print now takes 24 hours. Jobs that took 10 days before can now be done in one day, for productivity gains of 90 percent over the traditional offset systems.

Taken together, the electronic publishing systems' advantages make a fundamental contribution to the Space Agency. Digital duplicating with the DocuTechs has provided many tangible benefits for NASA: it saves time, saves money and guarantees quality—all of which are critical to the success of NASA's mission.