Maximizing Printer Placement: Six Workflow Considerations

Hello. Welcome to this session that overviews six workflow considerations when placing a new printer. Solimar has worked closely with printer vendors for decades to help implement printers and applications, which opens up new opportunities to grow your business, improve efficiency and profits, but can also present challenges. This session will cover some of the challenges you may face and how Solimar can help.

Placing a new printer or application can be an exciting time, with many variables to take into account. Here are just a few questions to consider about the printer and the related workflows as you move forward. Any time you introduce new equipment into your environment, it gives you the opportunity to consider why you do the things the way you do. And one of those items should be what print streams you use in your production workflows.

Many operations don’t choose which print streams they receive, since they get what they get, and they just need to deal with that. This diagram shows a pretty standard production workflow, where inputs are received in a variety of formats and are optimized for production. They are then transformed into format specific for printing, ePresentment, and archive. While you may not have control over what you get, you do have control over the output, especially when placing a new printer.

Right now, most print and workflow vendors have settled on PDF as the best go forward print stream. PDF also carries JDF along with it as the preferred protocol for submitting jobs to PDF printers. IPDS is a capable and traditional leader in transactional work, but PDF is generally considered better for color and graphics rendering. Other formats like PostScript and VIPP are still viable, but are not quite as strong as PDF as a standard format. PDF is the one format you can easily view and can be used for proofing, and is ubiquitous in the market. This makes it an easy choice.

Another decision point is around where to do transformations. The options here to use a centralized server, or to use transforms available on your printer’s front end or DFE. For shops with 1 or 2 printers, doing transforms at the printer or DFE makes sense. However, there are challenges and downsides to this approach, such as it can be more expensive to purchase the needed transforms for each controller. There can be consistency issues if you use a different DFE, even if they’re from the same vendor, you can get different results from across printers and from a workflow standpoint, centralized transforms have an advantage, such as enabling you to distribute output wherever you want without regard to whether there’s a transformer available there.

Most large operations choose to use a centralized transformation in distributed print, which provides better consistency, control, and workflow flexibility. One way to do that is with our Print Director Enterprise, or SPDE solution, that supports print stream conversions from and into the majority of production print stream formats. This table shows the transforms available with our solutions, which also includes a variety of data optimizations such as with PostScript and PDF to make your applications compatible with your printers and run at rated speed.

Onboarding new or existing work to a new printer can be very simple, or it can be very complex. It really depends on what you get in the complexity for each workflow. We saw in the last section how jobs are ingested into the system, typically with the transform into a standard format, which for us is PDF. Most organizations strive to have a single workflow solution that handles all types of work and have this workflow tracked, monitored, and integrated with controls built in.

Making all of your work look the same with standardization has huge benefits for your operations. You might have some oddball ad hoc application to handle, but it’s helpful to eliminate as many of one-off workflows as you can. It’s very common that your new printer is significantly different from what it’s replacing, which means that the files will need to be reworked. Many times, existing jobs are built for your print, finishing and distribution processes. These are commonly known as print ready files. It may include things like barcodes, finishing marks, and it may be imposed from what it’s currently in place. Since these things tie the job to a specific print production process and they may need to be removed or modified.

If the files are already process neutral, it’s good to go. If it’s not, you may have your work cut out for you, which is where our Rubika solution comes in for output re-engineering or modification. Once you have clean uniform input files, there are a lot of things that you can do with them. You can enhance the content by adding color, replacing logos, adding transpromotional material, deleting or adding blank pages, and much more.

For jobs that were previously cut sheet using preprinted shells, underlays can be added to replace them. If you plan on printing them in color, more on that later. Process neutral jobs can be batched with like work for further production efficiency. Making a lot of small jobs into one big job makes managing work much easier. Jobs can use postal processing software to perform sortation, national change of address. and other postal optimizations. This is especially effective with jobs that are batched together. Once output is optimized, it can now be released into production. When a print, finishing and distribution plan is selected by the operator, the job is released and the job can be re-engineered for that specific process. This binds the production process to the job, so the job ends up much like the process specific jobs it started out with. Except this time, it’s your process. This is usually done as part of a fully automated, lights out process, but you can always choose to put the job into a queue and let operators make the call on how to process the job based on the current availability of equipment, staffing and schedules. In that scenario, Operations is empowered to decide when and how to run a job in their plant based on the conditions on the ground.

Rubika does all of that. Rubika is a Swiss Army knife for job re-engineering. If there’s something you need to do, chances are pretty good Rubika has a number of different ways to get it done. One of the benefits of cut sheet printing is the ability to handle tray pulls and inline finishing, producing finished work off the end of the machine.

Moving work to different machines while maintaining tray calls and finishing can be a tricky business. Why is that? It’s because methods for handling finishing is a really important capability and it’s a mess. There’s no real dominant method for managing this across vendors. Every vendor seems to have a different way to do it. This makes things really complicated when you want to move work to a new printer, split work across multiple different printers, batch jobs together, or even send work with inline finishing or tray pulls to a disaster recovery operation.

We’ve seen Operations keep hardware on the floor just to run a single legacy job. Because of this, this is an area where Solimar has done a lot of work. We can ingest almost any type of finish information, add, remove or modify and then output them to any other method. Using Rubika, we can add finishing commands to files that never even had them, or even convert existing finishing commands into barcodes to drive offline finishing processes. This greatly simplifies moving work from one cut sheet device to another.

Most people moving to continuous feed are moving to full color inkjet printers. This opens up a whole new set of possibilities for the work you’re currently producing. With cut sheet printers, the first thing many companies want to do when getting a new inkjet is move to a white paper factory workflow. This typically involves replacing preprinted shells with electronic underlays. The white paper factory workflow is streamlined and requires very little human intervention. This saves huge money on things like warehousing and managing inventory for preprints. White paper factory workflows are great for disaster recovery or overflow printing to another white paper factory, since it removes the dependency of inventory management for preprinted stocks. Reprints are simplified. Unlimited changes can be made to the digital preprints without the hassle, and expensive physically reprinted them. If you need special marks for quality control pages, Rubika has you covered here as well. Reversing the jobs print order digitally prior to print is less expensive and faster than using mechanical rewinders, another task made really easy by Rubika.

When you get a new printer, you’re almost always increasing print volume and many times adding full color. This usually means larger print files than before, sometimes much larger. These big jobs can bog down your prepress workflow and kill RIP times. Performance of your prepress and RIP workflows are more important than ever to support with your new printer. One way to handle this is by buying more servers and just throwing hardware at it. Another way is to try to decrease the size and improve the efficiency of the bloated files, bogging down your workflow by optimizing PDF within your workflow.

PDF optimization does more than just make small files, although it does do that. You get granular capabilities to remove unwanted content, resample images, reorganize the objects in the file, and make it go as fast as possible in your workflow, while maintaining your standards for quality. The data here is based on Keypoint Intelligence Lab testing with ReadyPDF. Unlike most optimizers, ReadyPDF was built ground up for transactional PDF files. If you haven’t tried it yet, you should give it a try and see how it can help with your files. Every operation has a system for submitting, routing and managing jobs.

When placing a new printer, it’s a good time to consider if your current solution will meet your future needs. Regardless of your output management or tracking solution, you still need to decide the best way to communicate with your new printer. Our recommendation is to use a protocol that gives you bidirectional feedback from the printer. Printers that communicate in this way can report back on things like percent done errors. It can even allow users to cancel and otherwise control a job out on the press. With bidirectional printing, printers report back that the job is completed and advances the workflow to the next step automatically. It can also report on how long it took to print. Hot folders and other methods, or fire and forget blind handoff to the workflow can be a thing of the past.

Output management allows you to ingest, queue, route, and manage work across multiple destinations in an automated way, based upon the business rules and/or the operators prerogative. This is key to being able to distribute work across your various assets to ensure you’re maximizing productivity for each type of job. Different, yet related, is an operational tracking dashboard. The dashboard integrates your automated digital and physical workflows to monitor and track jobs and job related events as they happen. Prepress, post press, shipping and beyond, dashboards put a pretty face on your workflow by offering a web-based interface for managing and tracking automated, and manual processes within your workflow. An output management system only covers a subset of the digital workflow.

Our SOLitrack solution, as the name implies, tracks jobs, pieces, and processes in your operation. Not only does it have a strong output management capability of its own, it works in concert with SPDE to make SPDE even more powerful as an output management solution. Visibility is probably the main reason for using the dashboard, but we think a close second is to collect data on the work going through your operations, so that you can analyze and identify areas for process improvement.

SOLitrack has extensive reporting capabilities for this purpose. If your output device supports it, it can also extract ink and media usage on a per job basis and report on it. For each work area in your operation, you can configure a monitor to show the focus there, what work in due, past due, complete, and more. Since it only shows jobs that need to be processed in a specific area like for example, cut sheet print. It’s a burndown that helps the workers be more productive and engaged. Each activity in the workflow has to report on what is happening to a central tracking system. This system uses a database to track and monitor what’s happening to all of your jobs and production, and even after distribution. By using mail tracking, SOLitrack can track jobs before they hit production, while they’re being produced, and after they’ve been shipped, tracking mail pieces all the way down to the mailbox.

Thank you for your time. We hope you found this session helpful, and feel free to reach out to us with any questions.