No More 4:00 a.m. Phone Calls: How Braga Fresh Used Vasion Print to Fix Printing

 

Printer management was time-consuming and inconvenient at Braga Fresh, a family-owned farm and food processing business in the Salinas Valley. IT Systems Administrator Michael Avalos regularly received 4:00 a.m.calls to fix printing issues, which could hold up business operations if left unresolved. Switching to Vasion Print (formerly PrinterLogic) allowed the Braga Fresh IT team to eliminate over 200 hours of IT time each year and significantly reduce print rendering times.

 

Braga Fresh has been family-owned and operated in California’s Salinas Valley for three generations. In that time, the farm has become vertically integrated, combining innovation with tradition to grow, harvest and process fresh vegetables and leafy greens through the Josie’s Organics and Braga Farms brands.

 

Every day, Braga Fresh ships thousands of cartons of fresh produce and salads to retailers across the United States. Each carton requires a shipping and traceability label, and each of those labels needs to be printed quickly and efficiently.

 

Their printer setup was complex, connecting users through their ERP software to an offsite print server. They also had a separate print server to handle local printing.

 

Printing was a complicated and often inconvenient process, according to Michael Avalos, the Braga Fresh IT Systems Administrator:

 

“We would lose connection to the print servers, and print jobs would get stuck in the print spooler,” he says. “We had to manually deploy and troubleshoot printers and servers. It was inefficient and wasted a lot of our team’s time.”

 

Each week the IT team spent at least 3-5 hours resolving printer issues. “It was a headache. And it was inefficient, both for the IT team and the end user,” he adds.

 

The Braga shipping and processing facilities operate 24/5. At least once a week, Avalos would be called in to fix a print server at 4:00 or 5:00 a.m.

 

“It was stressful, and causing a delay in production is not an option,” he says.

 

When Avalos saw an ad for Vasion Print on LinkedIn, his entire framework shifted. He realized there was a better, more efficient way to manage printing.

 

Braga Fresh engaged Vasion Print and had the platform set up and running within one week. They were able to pull together all of the printer drivers and data from their current server and easily transfer the data to Vasion Print.

 

“It was very intuitive and straightforward,” Avalos says. “We didn’t need much support, but the few questions we did have, the support team addressed for us very quickly.”

 

By switching to localized printing, they’ve significantly cut the time required to render print jobs. “It goes straight from the workstation to the printer, without having to query the print servers. It’s a lot faster than it was before,” Avalos says.

 

Updates are straightforward, and Avalos rarely needs to look at the infrastructure or monitor reports. “It just works. I rarely even need to log in to Vasion Print.”

 

With Vasion Print, Michael Avalos has gone from spending three to five hours troubleshooting printers to less than an hour per month. That’s nearly 200 hours of IT time saved each year. “I can set Vasion Print and forget about it,” he says. “It’s easy to use and very convenient.”

 

He can manage their entire print infrastructure from one portal, and updating a printer driver is as simple as uploading it to the Vasion Print portal. “With a click of a button, every printer is going to get the update at the next refresh. I only have to go to one portal instead of multiple print servers.”

 

Braga Fresh no longer faces production delays due to faulty print servers, and Avalos no longer gets those dreaded 4:00 a.m. calls. “Now I can allocate my time to projects that matter, rather than fixing the same printer issues every week,” he says.