As the Athens 2004 Olympic games commenced, Xerox had assembled a force of over 230 engineers from 19 countries to handle the printing and publishing needs of the Games. To meet the Athens 2004 Olympic committee's guidelines, that results need to be recorded, tabulated and reported in hard copy to press, broadcasters, judges, Olympic officials, athletes, sponsors and Olympic staff, within five minutes of the completion of each event, Xerox has created significant infrastructure on site across the 35 competition venues and 26 non-competition venues and guarantee they will have a technician on site within only 10 minutes should a fault be reported, wherever it occurs across all 61 venues.

To help fulfil this pledge, the Technical Operations Centre (TOC), was manned around the clock during the event. The TOC allowed Xerox technicians to monitor all networked devices, enabling Xerox to anticipate any issues that may have arisen and check or replace equipment before any problems actually occur.

Xerox is able to monitor all 6000 pieces of equipment through its CentreWare Network Services, which monitor and manage print and fax jobs. CentreWare acted as the central command centre providing information about all devices available on the network servers and jobs printed to those devices, including troubleshooting paper jams, deleting or holding print and fax jobs, and delivering the network device status of any piece of Xerox equipment installed in an Olympic location.

"The service levels in place, amount of equipment provided and ability of Xerox engineers to handle all the document needs for the Athens 2004 Olympic Games is a recognition of how critical the behind-the-scenes processes are to making the event run smoothly," says Vince Schaeffer, director, Worldwide Olympic Operations for Xerox. "The bottom line at events like this is that customers want to know that their systems will work when needed, and that there are systems in place to ensure near 100% availability. This is what we aimed to achieve for the full 17 days of the Olympic Games."

Throughout Xerox's 40-year relationship with the Olympics, the complexity of the document processing requirements has evolved dramatically. In 1964, during the Winter Olympic Games in Innsbruck, Austria, plain-paper copiers were used to print seven copies per minute. During the Summer Olympic Games in Greece in 2004, more than 6000 printers, copiers and multifunction machines supported over 120 million pages of printing, between 10 000 and 18 000 different reports throughout the 17 days.

For more information contact Sandy Soal, Bytes Document Solutions, 011 928 9111.