Parallel printing system

A printing system comprising:

• a first stand alone printing system and a second stand alone printing system, the printing systems not sharing a common media routing path, and each printing system adapted to generate a print media output stack including a plurality of print media sheets associated with a print job;
• two or more interposer modules, each interposer module including a plurality of print media sheet stack inputs and the interposer modules adapted to manually receive the print media output stacks from the first and second stand alone printing systems where any of the plurality of print media stack inputs can receive print media output stacks from both the first and second stand alone printing systems;
• a manual print media stack transport system adapted to manually transport print media output stacks from the first and second stand alone print systems to the plurality of print media sheet inputs associated with the two or more interposer modules;
• one or more interface modules, the interface modules operatively connected to the two or more interposer modules, the interface modules adapted to sequentially collect a predetermined sequence of print media sheets associated with the print job and which are compiled from the print media output stacks received by the interposer modules;
• and
• a controller operatively connected to the two or more interposer modules and the one or more interface modules, the controller configured to generate a command to manually transport one or more of the print media output stacks generated by one or more of the first and second stand alone printing systems to predetermined interposer print media stack inputs, and the controller configured to control the sequencing of the print media sheets from the print media output stacks received by the interposer modules to the one or more interface modules,
• wherein the printing system is configured to merge the received print media sheets associated with the print media output stacks in a predetermined sequence associated with the print job, and outputting the merged print media sheets to the one or more interface modules and the controller is configured to execute the print job by performing a method comprising:
• receiving a first document job from a job queue;
• assigning each document sheet of the first document job to the first printing system or the second printing system, wherein the first document job is divided into a first printing system print job and a second printing system print job;
• communicating the first printing system print job to the first printing system and communicating the second printing system print job to the second printing system, the first printing system and second printing system communicating to the controller the completion of their respective print jobs;
• commanding the manual print media stack transport system to transport the first printing system output stack to one of the interposer first stack input and the interposer second stack input;
• commanding the manual print media stack transport system to transport the second printing system output stack to the other of the interposer first stack input and the interposer second stack input;
• and
• commanding the interposer modules to assemble the first print job from the interposer first and second stack inputs, wherein the printed document sheets associated with the first and second stack inputs are selectively merged and routed to create a printed document sheet sequence representative of the first document print job.