Batch Size and Batch Switching Time
Key to Maximizing Scanner Productivity
A Böwe Bell + Howell scanner user recently reported scanning 60,000 pages in a single day with a Spectrum model 8125 — that model’s daily duty cycle. While that’s fairly common, other owners of high-speed, high-volume scanners sometimes ask us why their scanning operations do not achieve these remarkable daily duty cycle numbers.
A host of factors can affect a production scanner’s daily duty cycle. The two greatest influences, however, have little to do with the scanner’s rated speed. To maximize a scanner’s productivity, one must take into consideration batch size and the average time the scanner operator spends switching batches. Yet, these factors often are overlooked.
Take, for example, the Spectrum 8125, which has a speed of 125 pages per minute (ppm). If its average batch size is 20 pages and the scanner operator spends 30 seconds on average switching from one batch to the next, that imaging operation can only scan an average of 14,545 pages in a single, eight-hour shift [(20/125 x 60)/(20/125 x 60 +30) x 125 x 60 x 8 = 14,545].
If the scanner operator increases the batch size to 50 or 100 pages, in a single shift the same scanner can handle 26,667 or 36,923 pages, respectively. And if the scanner operator is able to reduce the batch switching time to 15 seconds from 30 seconds, the scanner can process 45,714 pages in a shift with 100-page batches.
Able to scan up to 500 pages per batch, Böwe Bell + Howell’s Copiscan® 8000 Spectrum scanners offer a variety of state-of-the-art features to help operators maximize batch size and reduce the average time required to switch from one batch to the next. Among them:
- Advanced paper feeding and handling technology to maximize paper separation between documents of varied thickness, sizes and shapes, and thereby reduce the time spent recovering paper jams — the No. 1 threat to productivity.
- Auto Color Detect technology to automatically scan bitonal and color documents in a mixed batch, without pre-sorting or patch coding.
- Two-level auto feeders that reduce batch switching time.
- VirtualReScan (VRS) technology which, with its automatic cropping and deskew features, helps maximize batch size by allowing the operator to scan mixed documents of varying sizes rather than manually sorting them. VRS also immediately recovers document multifeeds without requiring the operator to rescan the entire batch.
- Ultrasonic multifeed detection with “Ignore-by-size” functionality, which allows the scanner to handle envelopes, photographs and sticky notes without mistakenly identifying them as multifeeds and interrupting scanning.
- A Continuous feeder ramp accessory that allows the scanner to run without interruption when scanning batches of more than 500 documents.
If you’d like to learn more about how the Spectrum model 8125 and other Spectrum Series scanners…
- Help maximize batch size,
- Lower batch-to-batch switching time,
- Increase the overall throughput of your scanning operation,
Please contact us with any questions today.
