🚀 go-pugleaf

The University of Ottawa has been doing business with Mid-City for
many years.  They market OMR scanners made by Sekonic, we have an SR-701.

You may have noticed us asking lots of questions about NCS and Scantron.
We are not completely happy with the current situation.  The Sekonic
machine is quite acceptable for most of the time, but tends to break
down when put under heaver load.  For us, this is at the end of term
when we process in the order of 50,000 sheets in a week.

Mid-City is mainly a printing operation.  Sales and support of the
scanners is not their bread and butter.  Thus, they have a limited
staff who do maintenance.

We are located several hours drive from their office, so a problem
call usually takes a while to be serviced.  Sometimes the rep can not
get here till the next day.  To make up for this, the rep brings a
replacement machine with him.  If he is unable to fix our machine
quickly, he leaves the replacement and takes ours back to the shop.
Once repairs are completed, ours comes back and the replacement is
taken away.

The machine uses a Basic-like language for programming.  Unfortunately,
no-one here has taken the time to become fluent, so Mid-City has written
a few programs that just read the forms and build ASCII files.  These
files are then sent to the mainframe (VM) and processed using SAS and
other such software.  If we want to make any change to the ORM form,
we need to contact Mid-City and get help in changing the scanner code.

From the small look that I have taken at the language, it is not an easy
job for a non-expert to create new forms.  As a result of this, we
have only 2 general data-collection forms, and everybody has to
fit their application to these forms.

The Sekonic machines use a different form of timing-marks relative to
other vendors.  As a result, forms created for our machine can not
be read by NCS or Scantron (or at least not without changing read-
heads).  We have the only such machine in Ottawa, so when our scanner
breaks, we do not have the option of taking the forms to someone
"down the road".

The printing operation of Mid-City is very good.  Forms are well
done, and quick delivery.  Mid-City prints forms for people with
NCS machines (personal information), and probably for Scantron
also.

Conclusion:  for us, the Mid-City and Sekonic combination does not
deliver the service and functionality that we want.

Mike Hull
Operations Manager
University of Ottawa
(613) 564-6582