Hi Community,

I have a problem that has completely confused me - any help would be really appreciated!

We are (still) running IFS8, and are having a problem when we complete our supplier payment run.

The issue is that when we create our payment order, the payment advice documents (UNIFORM_PAYMENT_ADVICE_REP) that are created (to be emailed to suppliers) block everything else from printing. The PDF of the payment advice is emailed to each individual supplier via an event action.  

Our payment runs typically include ~200 separate suppliers and the whole process takes up to 30 mins to complete. During this time no other print job is able to complete. In the past this was not too much of a problem for us, but we now need to do much more operational printing in our Depots in the afternoon, and the payment run stops them from printing.

Our printing is setup so that we have several different report formatters setup to manage printing at different sites:

Each of these is mapped to one or more logical servers. The batch cues are configured to only allow 1 job at a time per queue This helps us balance printing across sites so that no one depot can hog all. This works well for our normal printing jobs (e.g. pick lists, load lists, customer order confirmations...). Note we are using Crystal Reports.

The behaviour we see on the Print Manager queue when running the Payment Order is that we get individual payment advice documents on the print queue, each one being requested to be printed on the PDF Archiver printer.

We have the PDF Archiver on one of the report formatter queues. We thought this would mean other jobs on other printer queues could continue to run, whilst the PDF Archive worked through the list of jobs. However, the payment advice series of jobs ‘hogs’ all the printing resource, so no other job on any other queue can print until all the payment advices are completed. 

When we do the steps in our DEV environment with the email PDF event action turned off, the creation of the payment advice is very quick. It seems to be the act of creating the PDF to be attached to the email that slows the whole process down.

What I want to achieve is to have the ability for our Depots to continue to print on the other report formatter queues whilst the payment advice emails also print.

Big thanks

Ashley