Workflow

Success for print businesses depends on optimizing operations that enhance efficiencies, reduce costs, and reliably deliver the immediate responses most clients crave.

Optimization has always been a driver for success, of course. What’s different today is the hyper speed of doing business and demand for 24/7 service, compounded by the challenges of scarce skilled workers, inflation, tight margins, and other economic uncertainties. In this complex business environment, technologies that automate and digitize business processes form the heart of an optimized business. Most shops will have to keep the following items top of mind.

Digitization of the print industry has leaped over the last two decades. The average shop floor today is significantly more automated than it was 20 years ago. All front-end functions, administrative departments, presses, and e-commerce platforms are managed by workflow and MIS systems that share information for higher efficiency and productivity.

The bindery department, often the most labor-intensive area of the shop, had lagged somewhat, with job-ticket information not making it quite as far as the folders, cutters, and gluers. Part of the reason is the multi-faced aspects of bindery. After printing, paper can be die-cut, bound, folded, stamped, jogged, trimmed, or embellished with coatings, foils, and other decorative elements. Over the last few years, though, manufacturers have turned out automated versions of traditional devices, bringing automation to the back of the shop.

We recently assisted one of our customers with a major business evolution to inkjet. The company migrated from a cut sheet toner printing environment to continuous roll-fed inkjet platform. It’s a journey becoming common as clients demand the flexibility inkjet provides and printing companies scramble to respond.

Printers operating without a MIS system are flying blind

It is easy to tell if a print operation is making money by looking at profit and loss reports. Not so simple is finding the information management needs to make decisions such as determining how much work they can add before purchasing new equipment or when to hire more people. And recognizing the point to adjust pricing for individual jobs or accounts is nearly impossible without a system to capture job level data and generate cost analysis reports.

In many shops, job cost data from the production floor is randomly collected and rarely reviewed. Making the task even harder, many shops use separate, unconnected processes to handle estimates, order entry, job scheduling, postage deposits, time tracking, inventory, and billing. Employees manually copy information generated by one software system into another, leading to errors and omissions. Real time data is unavailable, rendering informed daily production adjustments impossible.

In environments where managers cannot compare job-level costs to budgets or estimates, changing conditions or inefficiencies can make it possible to unknowingly lose money on jobs–and do it repetitively.