Automating the way jobs flow can have a favourable impact on your costs, turnaround, output quality, and perhaps even enabling new business. Automation can improve every step in the print production process, enabling efficiencies that are needed to thrive as a business.
10 benefits from making workflow automaton a priority:
1. Enabling New Business
Workflow is a great source of opportunity and value, an enabler of new applications that drive new business to meet the changing needs of customers. For example the capacity to efficiently manage complex variable data printing introduces a new value offering as well as helping you exceed cost, quality and speed targets.
2. Bridging Print and Digital Media
More particularly, automated workflow helps enable multi-channel communications that incorporate print and digital media—email, PURLs, social media and mobile communications—and deliver better business results than traditional approaches. Automated solutions can orchestrate multi-media campaigns and personalized fulfillment. Increasingly, this is how marketers work today, and workflow automation helps add value to marketeers’ efforts.
3. Tightening relationships with Customers
When your systems are user friendly or even integrate with those of your customers, you become more valuable, even indispensable to them. Straight forward ordering is significant, and managing digital assets makes you valuable. Additionally having the tools to support marketing automation can give you strategic relevance, giving yourself a highly attractive offering.
4. Reducing Costs
Cost reduction is the benefit most desire for with workflow automation, and for good reason. These include labour-intensive, non-printing activities like estimating, prepress, and job tracking. Automating these processes frees staff for more value-added work.
5. Accelerating Turnaround
Of course, speed and reliability are critical factors in production speed, but workflow is the key to managing job-in to job-out turnaround. Go from manually pre-flighting, imposing, and processing each job to a completely automated workflow and you can hugely increase your print capacity. For example, a job that used to be a 3-4 day manual process can be shortened into two hours.
6. Eliminating Errors
When performing repetitive tasks, automated systems make fewer errors than people. Further, many systems incorporate error detectors, such as bar code readers that track a job’s progress and alert operators when errors occur. Automated systems ensure that the millions of checks they produce are in the correct amount and setup, preventing errors, that cost money.
7. Improving Output Quality
In traditional printing, achieving top image quality is a craft, but in digital, many quality processes can be automated to achieve extremely fine tolerances, including colour measurements beyond what the human eye can distinguish. These tools take the uncertainty out of colour and image-quality management, enabling the delivery of every job with confidence.
8. Easy to Implement
Some customers shy away from workflow automation systems—or fail to take full advantage of them—because they can be complex to implement and maintain. But today’s systems are designed for use by print operatiors, not programmers, with simple drag-and-drop operations to build workflows. Easy integration with your existing workflow, and modular design that permits easily scaling up as needs change. Cloud-based systems can further ease these concerns, offering nearly immediate implementation and eliminating the need to install system updates.
9. Affordability
Today’s workflow systems are more affordable than ever. Low purchase costs but also low installation fees and time means that printers can afford to adjust the way they work. Little risk of prolonged and painful teething periods.
10. It will help you Survive and Thrive
Many print service providers have cited automating their print production workflow as a priority. That’s because, in the mature print market, operational efficiency is key to success, and workflow is where efficiency can be controlled. Certainly, most print operations know by now that traditional offset workflow systems are too staff-intensive for the greater job quantities that include short-run, on-demand digital operations. Workflow automation helps printers compete successfully, meet cost-cutting goals and enable new business.
To learn how Duplo can assist you automate your print process contact us here.
