A continuous improvement team within the company had suggested the paper and microfiche-based report publishing process, which generated more than nine million pages of reports annually, was due for a change. Brass Craft hired a consultant to evaluate the major players in the field of electronically publishing reports, also known as computer output to laser disk (COLD). The consultant targeted 181 reports produced daily, weekly and monthly, including those that summarize sales orders, customer purchase orders, manufacturing schedules and financial reports.
The manufacturer chose to work with software from Metafile, which offered full-text indexing and optional field, structured and Boolean searches. The program works by reading the spool file and converting it to a compact, searchable file that resides on a Windows NT server. No host code changes were required.