Parts list on the right, drawing on the left, every single page

The problem

The parts list arrives as a print stream from SAP. The engineering drawings live separately in SAP and are fetched by article number, one PDF each. The two have to be stitched together so that the drawing is always on the left and the list on the right, even when the list spills over several pages. The old workflow fell over the moment the first sheet ended on an odd page count; from there on, everything slipped by one page. And the lists got longer over the years, not shorter.

The solution

1. Printing the list in SAP kicks off the job. The print stream comes in through Printer In and the XSF Converter into Lasernet.
2. The Form Engine pulls the article numbers out of the list and retrieves the drawings from SAP via the SOAP Modifier. Each drawing is dropped into the job folder as its own PDF, named by page number with a B suffix.
3. Workflow B writes every sheet of the list to disk as a separate PDF, also named by page number, odd pages tagged with A.
4. If a drawing is missing, or the first part ends on an odd page, an empty B-PDF fills the gap. That keeps duplex printing in step: front and back belong together again, and the document always starts on the front of a fresh sheet.
5. A Process Modifier merges the PDFs in the folder in the correct order and hands them off to a Lasernet printer.

What it delivered

The merge lines up at any page count, three drawings or none. The customer stopped counting pages.

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