10 Reasons to Make the Move to SOLitrack

SOLitrack is a product that does a lot of things. It allows you to start simple and then add capabilities when needed, and when you have the time. There are a lot of reasons customers choose SOLitrack. I’m going to walk through ten today. This diagram shows where SOLitrack fits in the Solimar solution platform. SOLitrack, as the name implies, tracks jobs and pieces within jobs from receipt through optimization, manufacturing, distribution, and even to the delivery. It does a lot more than just track pieces, as you will see. But let’s start there.

Tracking jobs in pieces is the most obvious, invisible reason customers use SOLitrack. SOLitrack tracks all jobs from when files are received through every step of the manufacturing and distribution, through mailing, shipping, and even delivery. You can also track all the way down to the individual piece level, recording every touch along the way. With a few button clicks. SOLitrack can be enabled for the existing SPDE, Rubika, and iCONVERT jobs to allow for those jobs to be tracked and reported on. SOLitrack can easily track non-Solimar processes electronically through API calls, and can use a manual tracking process from a shop floor workstation. A thick client is used for some advanced tasks, but most of the functionality is available through a customizable web-based dashboard that can be deployed internally or even with a limited view for your customers. This is the number one reason customers love SOLitrack.

Let’s talk a little bit about job level tracking and piece level tracking. Job level tracking is available for every job in the system. Answering important questions like where is my job in production and when will it be completed? Provides a digital job bag covering all information about that job in one place. Piece level tracking is an option you can add to SOLitrack. Once added, you can then select jobs and then enable them for piece level tracking, adding a new layer of tracking detail. This answers questions like where is a specific piece in production? Was it printed? Was it reprinted? Has it been viewed? You can even track delivery by the United States Postal Service. Piece level tracking jobs require integration with scanning equipment and a lot more diligence on the shop floor. So, you likely don’t want to use piece level tracking for every job. With SOLitrack, piece level tracking jobs and job level tracking jobs coexist within the same system. You add piece level tracking only to the jobs that require it, when you have the time to onboard them. You set the pace for onboarding piece level tracking work.

To support reprint workflows, viewing, and other piece level capabilities, SOLitrack uses SOLsearcher Enterprise, or SSE. It can be used exclusively as an infrastructure component for piece level tracking, but it can also be used as a document archive supporting long term storage, viewing or e-presentment applications. SSE is a scalable, fault tolerant, horizontal application that integrates easily with CRM and web presentment infrastructures. SSE is a very flexible framework that can be used in business-to-business applications like customer service, case management, and in business-to-consumer applications like retrieving and viewing bank statements in a bank, self-service web application. It has a customizable web-based user interface that can easily be branded to suit your needs. Supports content workflows where each user can tailor their own inbox and searching environments, speeding through document-centric applications, assembling documents, and delivering them over the web in real time. SSE optimizes PDF documents when storing them so that they use 5 to 15 times less storage than individual PDF files. This represents a huge savings and storage cost.

These days, it’s more important than ever to manage SLAs to ensure on time completion of jobs. With more and more smaller jobs, it gets harder to keep them from slipping through the cracks. SOLitrack allows you to automatically assign and manage SLAs for jobs as they are created within the system. You can easily prioritize or schedule based on SLA dates, so that you never miss a job or let it slip through the cracks. You can set up an airport monitor type display near each work area to show only the work that will hit that area. This lets operators see what they need to get done on their shift, giving them a burn down for their specific manufacturing area.

SOLitrack collects a ton of data about your print manufacturing process. It can provide reports and a slick dashboard giving you insights into your operations. You can also share this data with all of your business-critical systems such as ERP, print MIS, inventory, billing, shipping, and other systems, helping to remove data silos, ensuring accurate costing, billing and inventory tracking, and much more. This integration allows data to flow to and from your business systems in real time. Rather than re-keying data from a stack of job bags. Adding third-party systems to your workflow is simple using multiple APIs. Jobs created in third-party systems like print MIS and web-to-print systems can be submitted to SOLitrack programmatically. These systems are typically not very good at managing transactional or variable data jobs. SOLitrack can move these jobs through operations while providing status updates to the submitting system. SOLitrack has extensive and customizable reporting capabilities, as well.

Output management is in the DNA of Solimar. SOLitrack has queuing, routing and printing connectivity using JDF and JMF. SOLitrack can support any device using hot folders, but it can also support bidirectional communication capabilities if supported by your printer or DFE. It has robust support for IPP and JMF, allowing you to monitor job status, pause or cancel jobs at the printer from within SOLitrack. With JDF, after jobs have run, you can even retrieve and store ink and media usage for the job, if the printer supports that feature.

If you have multiple SPDE servers, SOLitrack can allow you to load balance across them. The server is busy processing. SOLitrack will check the next until it finds one that’s available. This allows you to maximize your processing power and accelerate your SPDE workflows.

Many shops are processing a greater number of smaller, more targeted print jobs. SOLitrack has the ability to do intelligent batching. That is the ability to automatically combine like work to improve operational efficiency and postal optimization. You can create a series of rules that allow batching to be completely automated. To combine work, you need to be sure that all the jobs have the same manufacturing and distribution plan. If they do, they can all be combined and treated as one big job. But it is not just as simple as concatenating files and printing them together, as you will see. A smaller number of batches is easier to manage and track than a larger number of jobs. Intelligent batching takes into account SLAs when combining work, ensuring that work gets done on time. If you’re looking to roll reprints into the next run, SOLitrack can do that automatically by adding them to a batch. Finally, batching allows for greater postal discounts and faster delivery when using digital presort, householding, and other postal optimizations.

Users can view documents and jobs and then approve the job by releasing it for production. SOLitrack supports multi-step approval processes with parallel and serial steps with notifications, auto approvals based on schedules and events. When using piece level tracking, a variety of special handling workflows can be done, including viewing individual pieces, diverting individual pieces at the inserter, suppressing them from print or electronic distribution, and much more.

At its heart, SOLitrack uses a database to record everything that happens in your operations. SOLitrack has a powerful alert mechanism that can notify you under a wide variety of easily configured production conditions, as well as comprehensive reporting capabilities that allow you to flexibly extract and visualize production data. Reprinting to ensure a 100% fulfillment can be disruptive to operations. Every job may have different needs for reprinting. Some require fully-automated reprints, while others may need manual reprints. Either way, SOLitrack has it covered. SOLitrack allows you to manually generate reprints using hand scanners or by keying in piece numbers. You can also do fully automated closed and open loop reprints using camera systems. As I said earlier, reprints can be batched with like work to print at a later time instead of holding up the rest of the job.

If you’re using piece level tracking, everything is tracked. For example here, you can see the percent of pieces reprinted across a selection of jobs. Base SOLitrack makes it easy to build workflows, perform output management, and track it all in a nice web-based dashboard. If you already have other Solimar apps, the value is really compounded. Adding SOLitrack takes a little more than a few mouse clicks. Doing reprints, batching, approval processing, and duplicate job checking are all very simple to set up and to use. Piece level tracking and mail delivery tracking take a little more work to set up, but they’re still fairly simple to get up and running. The best part is you don’t have to add all the features to all of your jobs at one time. You can add basic job tracking with simple configuration and then onboard more complex workflows, including piece level tracking, at your own pace.

SOLitrack can add value on day one, but don’t take my word for it. Let’s hear it from our customers. A great example of success with SOLitrack is the State of Colorado, in the United States. State of Colorado is one of the largest in-plant printers in North America. They do virtually all of the printing for the state. They were looking to automate and create visibility. They were looking to increase efficiency so that they can handle more volume within tight time frames. Previously, they attempted to build an end-to-end dashboard using a competitive product. That product required the State of Colorado to buy services not just to initially build the workflows, but to even add additional workflows for ongoing work. This didn’t fit with their budget or their culture. They decided to try SOLitrack. They had to build out a pretty comprehensive workflow which included automated insertion, closed loop reprinting, as well as production proofing prior to releasing jobs into production. Fortunately for them, as an existing Solimar customer, it was easy to layer SOLitrack over their existing SPDE, SOLfusion, and Rubika workflows. Within six months, they had onboarded all of their work using existing staff and without services. Doing the work themselves saved a lot of money. SOLitrack added a lot of capabilities to their existing workflows, while also reducing processing times across the board.

But don’t take my word for it. You should hear from them. There are several quick videos available where they tell their own story. Check it out on our website. Thank you for your time. We hope you found this session helpful and feel free to reach out to us with any questions.