How SOLitrack Transforms Your SPDE Workflow into a Production Powerhouse

Hello. This presentation will cover topics related to how SOLitrack specifically complements the Solimar Print Director Enterprise, or Speedy or SPDE. Each of these solutions can run standalone for their related tasks, but when combined, SOLitrack provides several benefits to enhanced SPDE’s workflows.

Both SOLitrack and SPDE are part of the overall Chemistry platform, which ties together modular solutions that combined to meet a variety of production, print, and electronic distribution requirements. The platform solves for many challenges companies face to help to become more efficient, reduce costs, and support a wide variety of workflow goals from file receipt through hardcopy and electronic delivery channels. It is helpful with our customers, ranging from small in-plants to some of the largest print centers in the world. Let’s take a closer look at SPDE and SOLitrack and how they complement each other.

SPDE is our primary solution for data stream conversions and print file optimizations. It supports connecting to various systems, converting output to various formats for print and electronic delivery, and managing the workflow with lots of capabilities that support a wide variety of common and obscure requirements that high volume producers of output often need to deal with. SOLitrack is our production dashboard that is pre-integrated with our other solutions that comprise the overall Chemistry platform.

It handles several important roles in production environments as it enables many of the workflow related concepts such as job batching, SLA views, scheduling, job and mail piece tracking, proofs and approvals, an operator console, job routing, and distribution for the production process and letting you know when things are going well or when there are issues by providing alert notifications along with reporting and more.

Here’s a high-level diagram to help show where the Chemistry platform can help. In a typical production workflow that we’ll use to position where SPDE and SOLitrack fit, your host system submits the print files to the workflow. They may need conversions or optimizations along with updating them with barcodes, postal processing, white paper factory concepts such as digital underlays, and so on. They are then sent to the various output channels for print and eDelivery, for mailing and finishing. On top of the production workflow, you have your other components such as inventory, accounting and MIS systems. In this workflow, Rubika provides for document modification and re-engineering, and SOLsearcher Enterprise provides for eDelivery and archive. You may also have third party components such as dashboards and MIS systems, along with your printers and finishing equipment. But these are not the focus of this presentation.

SPDE is focused to provide connectivity to host systems, data stream conversions, and optimizations, along with job management such as queuing and routing capabilities for driving printers. SOLitrack typically sits on top of the other workflow components and tracks, and automates processes in production while providing a production dashboard that allows you to view and manage your overall workflow from start to delivery while extending information to other systems. Each of these solutions on their own can log the activity they are performing, but the challenges that these log files are separate, so it’s not very convenient to follow all of the steps for each. Job’s processing history and status. Part of where SOLitrack fits is that it can log all of the activity to a centralized database, making it easy and convenient to see, then report on the overall processing activity.

Note that SOLitrack has a lot of tangent functionality, but this session is going to focus on a few topics related to where it benefits SPDE in particular. SPDE and SOLitrack are great by themselves for their targeted tasks and have some overlapping functionality related to output management. But when run together, SOLitrack can enhance these capabilities in several areas. Despite having comprehensive functionality, SOLitrack is relatively inexpensive for what it provides and is directly integrated with SPDE, with a few easy to configure settings in the user interface. All you need to do is enable it to get the following benefits.

The first benefit is that SOLitrack provides customizable visibility for various points in the workflow, with both the thin client and a web-based interface. The web-based dashboard is customizable and can be leveraged for both internal operations and with the limited view for external customers to summarize what’s going on in your plant, and it also supports releasing jobs from the web browser. On its own, SPDE doesn’t have support for a web interface, so SOLitrack provides for a more modern feel, with printer icons and different views of the activity.

Aside from visibility, the mobile web site provides functionality such as user viewing reports and jobs, approving or rejecting jobs, releasing and resubmitting jobs to process, changing a destination for the job, setting the status and reprinting mail pieces, and managing users in groups to add them to an approval trigger. Here’s an example where you can see the main jobs, and then the status of each individual mail piece within each job and your printers, and the status of the jobs associated with them. The web interface can run on a desktop or mobile devices to view job information, do proofs and approvals, release jobs for processing, see the status of devices, and manage alerts and notifications about successes and issues during production. The interface can be customized to support what you want the users to have access to and what’s relevant for them. For example, an operations manager would want to see the overall production information. An operator is typically concerned with the equipment they’re managing, and your customers or internal end users just want to see the status of their jobs. As jobs are processing, information about the progress and the printer status can be provided in both the thick and web clients. The printer icons can be customized with the images of your choice, so they make the most sense to your operators. Compared to SPDE, this enhances the look of the interface and can make it easier for users to find the information that they’re looking for.

Next is that SOLitrack enables you to track every production job across multiple stages in the workflow on its own. SPDE will create log files of its activity, but when files go through multiple processing steps in SPDE and other stages of the workflow, you have silos of information. Behind SOLitrack, is a database that is used to store information about every job that has gone through your production workflow. It’s fully integrated into the Solimar products like SPDE and there’s integration with status files from other systems like cameras. Getting information from a database is much better than managing log files. SOLitrack also has an open API and utility to support integration with external systems and processes for pushing information to SOLitrack or pulling information from it to feed applications and other areas of your workflow, such as other dashboards or manual processes like hand insertion.

For example, in this workflow you would have checkpoints for stages such as received, indexed, printed, mailed, and tracking points to track the printed hardcopy output status with updates via camera systems, and status files such as during finishing insertion and mail status steps. Compared to what SPDE tracks, here are some of the commonly used mail piece tracking states SOLitrack accounts for, and you can add your own custom tracking points as well. As jobs are processed, the status for visibility and reporting is updated through the integration with software, cameras, scanners or manual updates throughout the various tracking points in the overall production process within SOLitrack. The steps each file goes through are sequenced into a workflow, so you can monitor the overall progression of the jobs and pieces during their lifecycle and trigger notifications where appropriate.

SOLitrack’s view of the workflow can include the progression of files prior to print, during print, including printer status information, then through finishing and mail tracking information. While SPDE can provide information about a job it’s running at the entire file level, SOLitrack can support tracking of the individual mail piece records within each job.

All of the available information that SOLitrack logs into its database can be presented to the dashboard as reports using graphs, charts and sorted and filtered lists. This enables you to get access to a lot of information on not only what SPDE is doing, but on how long it is taking for jobs to process and where they are in the workflow, and more, which helps to gain insights about your business. SPDE doesn’t have reporting functionality like this to summarize the processing activity of its log files. In addition to reporting about your jobs, if the printer support JDF or JMF integration, SOLitrack can report on ink and media usage to help with chargebacks, inventory and monitoring jobs that are in line with your estimated ink usage. SPDE supports JDF for finishing controls on printers, but not the JMF reporting information like SOLitrack.

For many applications, SPDE runs lights out or fully automated for extended periods of time without any issues. However, if something goes wrong unexpectedly, it can be tricky to figure out what’s going on, especially if the files are going through multiple steps in the overall workflow. To help with troubleshooting, SPDE user logging to record activities, which includes errors and warnings. This is great while developing and onboarding new applications, but when you need to figure out an issue when they happen during production, log files aren’t that convenient and you may not have even had SPDE’s logging enabled. With SOLitrack, all SPDE’s activity is recorded to a database, and since it’s also logging the other stages in the job’s workflow, it makes it easy to track down where the issue is.

Item five is related to job scheduling and SLA management to help with getting your SPDE associated work out on time. Most production environments have service level agreements, or SLAs, associated with jobs that are critical to meet. SOLitrack will help you to manage SLA to ensure on time completion of your SPDE jobs. As the system processes jobs, it tracks them by SLA date when you know when the jobs are late or in jeopardy of being late. And you can set schedules as to when jobs should be run. This can be especially helpful when you need to track many smaller jobs through production by having a summary of production activity and what work is due, past due, complete, and so on. The SLA tracking features provide an overall view of every job status, or you can set up filters for different displays for each work area, device or building. It can automatically assign and manage SLAs for jobs as they are ingested and the overall view automatically refreshes, so it’s ideal for shop floor’s big screen displays. Along with SOLitrack’s alerts, this can help with your overall production awareness and status.

Item six mainly applies if you have multiple SPDE servers, as SOLitrack can allow you to load balance across them. If a server is busy processing, SOLitrack will check the next one until it finds one that is available so you can maximize your processing power across your SPDE server workflows. Without SOLitrack, true load balancing across your SPDE servers is not supported. SOLitrack also has more sophisticated load balancing and failover functionality for driving printers beyond what SPDE provides.

SOLitrack has an optional feature that will prevent the same job from being released into production more than one time. If you’ve ever had the same job run twice, you know how handy this feature can be. Running the job twice might be from an operator error, or the host system running a job more than one time by mistake. SOLitrack just doesn’t look at the file names, it actually looks at the content of the job to see if it was exactly the same. So even if they have different names, it will still be identified. SPDE has control of file naming, but not specific functionality for duplicate file checking upon ingesting files.

Item number eight is related to proofing and approval of jobs. SPDE is capable of viewing jobs, but there is no formal proof and approval functionality. With SOLitrack’s proof and approval workflow., users can view documents and jobs, and then divert or suppress specific records of the entire job before releasing them into production. It supports a multi-step approval process with parallel and serial steps, with notifications and auto approvals based on schedules and events. When combined with piece level tracking, the variety of special handling workflows can be done, including viewing for individual pieces diverting at the inserter, suppressing from print or electronic distribution, and much more.

As was mentioned previously, a great feature of SOLitrack is SLA management for your SPDE jobs. A common way to use this is to set up big screen monitors at each work area at your plant. You can set SOLitrack to display any jobs with workflow steps that are relevant to that area. For example, your inserters or your various printing pods. As the day goes on, operators can see at a glance where they are with their work, which can help them with productivity and keeping jobs on time. Our users also like it because it provides a good impression about your production environment when giving site tours.

When serving as an output management system from a daily operation standpoint, SOLitrack makes it easy for users to find the information that they need compared to SPDE. You can organize the jobs in folders and apply filters to them like a digital filing cabinet, so they’re easily organized for various tasks users want to do. Whether it’s operations staff, clients, or managers, if you’re not sure how a job is organized, you can quickly apply filters and do searches to locate what you need, and your administrators will be happy to know that there are robust security controls to limit access to information and what can be done with the information that is accessible. Within each job, you can see each individual record or mail piece in the state they’re in throughout their production lifecycle. In the thick client, printer operators can also quickly find their jobs based on filters, and then simply drag and drop them from the job queue window to the printer that they would like them to run on.

With all of this functionality, you’ll find that SOLitrack is a great value. SOLitrack’s core base system makes it easy to build workflows, perform output management, and track your production in a user-friendly web-based dashboard. If you already have other Solimar Chemistry components, the value is really compounded since integrating SOLitrack takes minimal additional configuration. Doing reprints, batching, approval processing, and duplicate job tracking are all very simple to set up and run. Piece level and mail delivery tracking takes a little more work to set up, but they’re still fairly simple to implement. A big benefit is that you don’t have to add all the features to all of your jobs at one time. You can add basic job tracking with a simple configuration and then onboard more complex workflows such as the piece level tracking, commingling, and batching at your own pace.

Thank you very much for your time. If you have any questions for easy to reach and look forward to hearing from you.