Turbocharging SPDE Workflows with SOLitrack: 9 Game-Changing Features
Solimar® Print Director™ Enterprise (SPDE) plays a crucial role as a workhorse in numerous production workflows, often serving as an unsung hero. However, the real magic happens when you pair SPDE with SOLitrack™, a low-cost, pre-integrated, state-of-the-art production dashboard. This presentation highlights nine key ways SOLitrack can dramatically improve your SPDE workflows, taking them to the next level.
1. Customizable Web-Based Visibility
SOLitrack boasts a feature-rich, web-based dashboard that provides not only real-time visibility into your plant’s operations but also grants control from any web browser. With this functionality, you can monitor and manage your workflow internally while also granting customers limited views of job statuses.
2. Comprehensive Tracking
As the name suggests, SOLitrack excels at tracking. It maintains a database that stores detailed information about jobs, enabling you to track Solimar products easily. Additionally, its APIs enable seamless tracking of activities from other software products, even manual processes like hand insertion. The accumulated tracking data serves not only to provide real-time insights but also facilitates metric-driven analysis of your jobs and processes over time.
3. Performance and Ink & Media Reporting
Leveraging a robust database, SOLitrack allows you to mine business information from job data, driving operational efficiency. Its extensive built-in dashboarding and reporting features provide at-a-glance views and enable the creation of custom reports for business intelligence purposes. With Job Definition Format(JDF) support, you can even track ink and media usage on a job-by-job basis, providing insights into operational costs.
4. Debugging and Fixing Jobs
When something goes wrong with SPDE, SOLitrack is your reliable troubleshooter. It maintains an extensive breadcrumb trail of processing activities and warns you if workflow steps fall behind schedule. This allows you to fix and resubmit problematic jobs without returning to the source system. SOLitrack’s sophisticated alert mechanism promptly notifies you of any issues, allowing for quick resolution and minimal disruption to production.
5. SLA Management & Scheduling
Most production workflows involve service level agreements (SLAs) tied to jobs. SOLitrack simplifies SLA management by enabling you to assign SLAs to SPDE jobs, providing real-time tracking of job progress relative to their deadlines. By incorporating scheduling capabilities, SOLitrack ensures that work is completed on time, minimizing delays and meeting customer expectations.
6. Maximize Throughput of Multiple SPDE Systems
If your operation includes multiple SPDE servers, SOLitrack is a powerful tool for load balancing. It automatically checks available servers and distributes jobs to the least busy ones, optimizing processing power and accelerating your SPDE workflows.
7. Duplicate File Checking
SOLitrack’s optional feature prevents duplicate jobs from being released into production more than once, saving time and reducing potential errors. This feature goes beyond file name comparisons and actually checks the job content, ensuring no duplicates slip through the cracks.
8. Proof, Reject & Approve Jobs
SOLitrack’s multi-step approval workflows streamline the proofing process, allowing for auto-approvals based on predefined rules or schedules. Notifiers keep approvers informed, and detailed reporting ensures transparency throughout the approval process.
9. “Airport Monitor View”
A standout feature of SOLitrack is its SLA management capability, which can be displayed on a big-screen monitor in designated work areas. By customizing the display to show jobs relevant to each area, employees can easily track their progress and prioritize tasks, boosting productivity and adherence to schedules.
In conclusion, SOLitrack provides a range of invaluable features that complement and enhance SPDE workflows. Its customizable dashboard, extensive tracking and reporting capabilities, debugging support, SLA management, load balancing, duplicate checking, approval workflows, and “Airport Monitor View” all contribute to improved efficiency and streamlined operations. Together, SPDE and SOLitrack create a powerful combination that exceeds the sum of its parts, offering a cost-effective solution for optimizing production workflows.
SPDE is a workhorse and it is the unsung hero in a lot of production workflows. SOLitrack is a low cost pre-integrated state-of-the-art production dashboard. This presentation will let you know some of the ways that SOLitrack can dramatically improve your SPDE workflows.
This diagram shows some of the areas where Solimar can help you in your production workflows. The highlighted boxes represent SPDE. SPDE transforms input and provides extensive output management, queuing and routing capabilities. The highlighted box here represents SOLitrack. SOLitrack tracks and automates processes and production while providing a production dashboard that allows you to view and manage your workflow from start to delivery.
SOLitrack does a lot of things. Here we’re going to talk about a few that may be of particular interest to SPDE users. SPDE and SOLitrack are great by themselves, but together they are truly more than the sum of their parts. Despite having comprehensive functionality, SOLitrack is still relatively inexpensive. The best part is that SOLitrack works with SPDE out of the box. All you need to do is enable it to get everything we’ll talk about today and much more. This is the most obvious feature of SOLitrack. It has a rich web-based dashboard, not only allows you to see at a glance what’s going on in your plant. It also allows you to control SOLitrack from a web browser.
SOLitrack is used internally to monitor and control your workflow, but you can also set it up to show limited views of jobs and status for your customers. SOLitrack also has a thick client shown here, which is used more as a development and admin tool in addition to drag and drop printing and control of jobs. You can use it to attach files like customer supplied notes, PDFs, really anything and use that to create a digital job bag.
There’s a reason it’s called SOLitrack. Behind SOLitrack is a database that’s used to store information about jobs. Tracking Solimar products is easy. You just need to enable it. There are APIs that allow you to easily track the activities of other software products as well. SOLitrack can track manual process is like hand insertion and it can be used to track anything. Tracking is great to tell you what is going on right now, but even better at providing metrics on all of your jobs and processes over time. All that data can be displayed on a dashboard using graphs, charts, sorted and filtered lists can get a ton of data on what SPDE is doing, how long it’s taking for jobs to process, jobs running at devices and more. In addition, with JDF SOLitrack can even retrieve and store ink and media usage after jobs process to help understand costs on a job by job basis.
Most SPDE apps run lights out, many for years without problems. SPDE is a workhorse. When something goes bump in the night, it can be tricky to figure out what is going on. SPDE uses logging to record activities, including errors and warnings. This is great while developing apps, but you need to hunt down issues when they happen in production. SOLitrack is always watching SPDE and recording everything it is doing in a database if there’s an issue. Not only will it have saved everything about the job, it can easily notify you when there’s an issue and bring it to your attention before you even notice any disruption in production. You also get a strong set of clues that can get you back on track as soon as possible.
Most everyone has service level agreements associated with jobs. When your SPDE job starts, you can assign an SLA to it. As the system processes the job, it tracks them by SLA date, letting you know when jobs are late or in jeopardy of being late. Jobs can be set to run on a schedule as well. SOLitrack can really help you get your work out on time. If you have multiple SPDE servers, SOLitrack can allow you to load balance across them. The server is busy processing so triple check the next until it finds one that is available. This allows you to maximize your processing power and accelerate your SPDE workflows. 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. SOLitrack doesn’t just look at the file name, it actually looks at the content of the job to see if it is exactly the same. So even if they have different names, it’ll still be identified. If you need proofing, this is a great feature you can get with SOLitrack. You can set up multi-step approvals, use schedules, notify approvers and report on the approval process. As was previously mentioned, a great feature of SOLitrack is SLA management for your SPDE jobs. One way of doing it is to set up a big screen monitor in a work area of your plant. You can set SOLitrack to display on jobs with workflow steps that hit that area. For example, the inserters or black and white cut sheet printing area. Each work area can set the display up to show only the jobs that will hit there. As the day goes on, they can easily see at a glance where they are with their work. This can help the productivity and keeping jobs on time.