Job Scheduling in Lean Document Production

Lean Document Production (LDP) is a novel class of productivity-enhancement offerings that were originally invented at the Xerox Research Center Webster (XRCW) for the $100 billion printing industry in the United States. Implemented by Xerox in over 100 sites to date, LDP has provided dramatic productivity and cost improvements for both print shops and document-manufacturing facilities, as measured by reductions of 20∼40% in revenue-per-unit labor cost. LDP has generated over $200 million of incremental profit across the Xerox customer value chain since its initial introduction in 2000. In the past three years, PARC’s Embedded Reasoning Area has been collaborating with XRCW to extend the scheduling capabilities of the LDP toolkit. We describe a number of newly added features such as adaptive batch splitting, multi-site scheduling and multi-core parallelization that have significantly improved the performance of our AI search-based scheduler for print shops of all sizes, particularly for those large document-production facilities that can process thousands of monthly jobs on a diverse set of document-production equipment with non-uniform speed and sequence-dependent setup times.