In any endeavor there is often one key item that can bring everything to a grinding halt. When you’re on your way to work in the morning that item is your car key, for example. If you can’t locate your keys, everything comes to a grinding halt and you aren’t able to drive to work, despite the big shiny car parked in the driveway. Oh sure, you can call a taxi, but that’s not going to get you there on time, and it’s going to be an expensive work-around. If you run a small retail operation, there are any number of little things that could interrupt the day’s activities.

Of course, like your car keys, if you can’t find the door keys to open up shop for the day, business is going to be a little slow, at least until you can get inside, but let’s assume that you are able to get the doors open, flip the sign over to “open,” and be ready for customers. Running out of inventory will certainly put a damper in the day’s receipts, even if it’s just one popular item that is out of stock.

Speaking of the day’s receipts, if you run out of thermal paper for the cash register, then you’re not going to be able to ring up any sales either. If that happens, you do have two choices to fix the problem, though. You can close up and run down to a business supplies stores and pay twice your regular price for a few thermal paper rolls for the register. That’s inconvenient and expensive – especially when you consider the lost business while you’re closed. Your second option is to use manual receipts, write out each sale by hand, and do your best not to make any math errors. This won’t kill you, but will certainly slow things down as customers are entertained watching you try to calculate sales tax percentages.

Then, there’s paper for the credit card machine. This one has no work around, if you aren’t able to print credit card authorization slips, then you aren’t able to accept credit card purchases. Your best bet here is to put a sign in the window so customers without cash know not to even bother walking in the door. Nobody likes turning away business, but until you get the credit card machine up and running again, there aren’t a lot of choices.

The funny thing about these little items is that they are all tiny little, seemingly unimportant items when gauged against the overall business. Like the expensive car waiting in the driveway with keys, the problem item represents only the tiniest fraction of the value of the whole enterprise, and it’s something that goes practically unnoticed when everything is working well. When it’s missing, though, the consequences can be very large , indeed.

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With a computer and particularly with CAD programs, it is possible to make engineering drawings and plans of virtually any size. You can zoom in to see the tiny details and zoom out to see the big picture both literally and figuratively. Most of the actual physical work in building a new prototype, however, doesn’t happen in front of a computer screen. The people who need the information contained in that drawing in order to turn it into reality, need something a little more portable. Today, as in days past, that means an actual paper drawing.

Today, those drawings are created with the computer and then printed out on a special oversized printer called a plotter. The plotter recreates the entire drawing on extra large plotter paper using a scale that makes it easy for the fabricators or technicians to see all the fine detail of the engineering drawing. The plotter can reproduce any kind of engineering drawing required to turn the concept into reality.

These usually include an exploded view drawing showing all the various components of the device as they will be put together in the finished device, an assembly drawing showing the components assembled together in the final form, materials lists, component drawings showing each piece of the device by itself, finish schedules that detail the surface treatments of the assembly, packaging drawings, and even marketing artwork for the carton manufacturer. Of course, there may be many more as well, including schematic drawings if the thing being drawn has electrical circuits.

These drawings are often printed out on the plotter paper and then packaged up as complete sets for those who need to see the whole picture, such as checkers, safety engineers, and others whose responsibility includes every aspect of the product. Others may have more limited needs and will receive a subset of the entire engineering drawing package. Those with limited need for drawings might include the circuit board layout designer, the packaging engineer, printers, and graphic artists.

Because of the wide variety of people who use these drawings and the number of projects that may be in development at a particular company, the engineering plotter is often in high demand as the only device capable of reproducing the fine detail of a complex new design in a size that allows it to be seen clearly without the use of a magnifying glass. Often these drawings are needed for a very specific time either for a group meeting or to coincide with the availability of a particular fabrication machine. It may take a considerable amount of time to print a single drawing due to the complexity and size of each image. Plotter time is often scheduled in advance to be sure that drawings can be completed to meet the time requirement.

Since the engineering plotter is often remotely located to those who send their drawing files to be printed, it is incumbent upon each user to make sure there is plotter paper left in the machine for the next printing job.

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