Industrial Placement Report - Muller Martini Ltd, 1998
Company Profile
Muller Martini, a Swiss based company employing over 4000 people world-wide, designs and manufactures a range of Printing and Print Finishing equipment. The UK headquarters, at Iver, Bucks. is responsible for all aspects of sales, technical support, servicing, spare parts and equipment re-conditioning. These products are sold to a cross section of the Printing Industry from major newspaper publishers to small bookbinders.
Project Description
Once a newspaper has been printed and all the necessary supplements inserted, there is a need to collate varying sized bundles to be despatched to distributors or individual newsagents. Muller Martini supplies this Stacker Control equipment (SCS) but the labels identifying the destination of each bundle are printed on a range of proprietary label printers. In upgrading the control system from an old MS-DOS based protocol to a Windows 95 system it was established that the print manager within Windows 95 is too slow.
Ashley's project was to write the software to enable the SCS system to communicate with a range of label printers enabling different print formats and styles etc. to be used at an adequate speed. The software employed, (Borland C++), is a high-level programming language requiring very specialist knowledge.
Ashley's Performance
Ashley was provided with an outline of the project requirement by the department head, Mr. D. Brown. The programme written by Ashley required not only a very specialised knowledge but in addition required him to use his own initiative to a very high degree. For example, he has added printer set-up Wizards to facilitate the users initial set-up. The completed programme has been tested and achieves all the objectives.
Additional Comments
Whilst at Muller Martini Ashley conducted himself in an exemplary manner. Despite spending most of his time in the computer department, Ashley was courteous and communicated well with other members of the organisation. He was punctual and dressed casually but smartly.
Summary
The work that Ashley has completed will be used in a real application that will be part of a system sold to our customers. If Ashley had not completed this task, one option would have been to employ a specialist programmer. Ashley's understanding of this programming language is well beyond his years.
I would have no hesitation in using him again.
M Snoad
