Unleashing the Power of Fiery: A Consultant's Journey in Revolutionizing Printing Workflows

A growing number of printing companies are placing increased focus on workflow automation as the industry continues to face competitive challenges, both from inside and outside the industry. In this article, sponsored by Fiery LLC, we speak with Meredith Nichols of Nichols Associates, who is Fiery Certified as well as a Certified G7 Expert. She explains how she works with clients to help them reach those automation goals.

Product Spotlight: PRISMAcolor Manager—On Cloud Nine

Canon’s PRISMA offerings include a wide range of applications and tools to help optimize print production workflows and digital printing production. These solutions have amassed over the life of PRISMA and have adapted to the changes in technology and production requirements, as their use requirements have changed significantly over the years. David Zwang takes a close look at how PRISMA has evolved, focusing especially on a recent addition to the software suite: PRISMAcolor Manager.

Unlocking Printer Performance: The Key Role of a DFE in Driving Efficiency

In this article, sponsored by Fiery, we take an in-depth look at factors to consider when choosing a digital front end (DFE) for a new or existing digital printer. It emphasizes the importance of a robust DFE for efficient and high-speed print operations. Not all DFEs are created equal, and simply comparing hardware specifications does not tell the whole story; that approach can actually be quite misleading. You can also download an in-depth white paper for additional information.

Get More from Your Print Operations

By optimizing costs and resolving bottlenecks, the print industry can bring more efficiency to its business, resetting print economics and getting more from its print production. Let’s do it! Process automation increases productivity, helps to control bottom-line costs, and can add hidden capacity. In this article, sponsored by Baldwin Technologies, see how Baldwin solutions are based on decades of experience bringing insights to printing companies with data and automation. See how they can help you conquer today’s challenging print industry economics.

Zaikio: Progressing in Procurement

European section editor Ralf Schlözer takes a look at the current state of Zaikio, and its recent integration of a procurement app that can aid or fully automate supplies ordering processes.

Printers Share Their Workflow Automation Success Stories

Patrick Henry takes a deep dive into the myriad ways print businesses are implementing workflow automation, the tools they are using, and the results they have achieved. The range of what printers have accomplished indicates how much becomes possible once a plant commits to workflow automation.

Product Spotlight: Getting Product Personalization Right with LiveArt

Consumers are no longer satisfied with only buying mass-produced products. Online and brick-and-mortar print shops have offered B2B and B2C buyers the ability to customize printed products, but the process is sometimes complex and hard to understand. Pat McGrew looks at LiveArt’s web-to-print services which address the gap between off-the-shelf web-to-print solutions available in the market and the growing needs of printers requiring more custom-tailored solutions for their clients.

Gamechanger and Online Print Booster: 30 Years of PDF

From the World Wide Web to cloud services, technological developments in recent decades have fundamentally changed industry and business—and with them the work and processes in print shops. However, one small tool, or rather file format, is often overlooked in the list, even though data exchange in general and online printing in particular would not work as we know it today. We’re talking about PDF, the Portable Document Format, which turns 30 this year—and has been with me for just as long. Time to talk about its history and its importance to printing.

Zen and the Art of Software Maintenance

At its essence, software is a tool that is based in science, but has artistic manifestations. The style of coding, the elegance of programming expression, and the user interfaces that join the user to the software capabilities create a yin/yang relationship. Software does require care and feed, however. Here is some guidance on living with software, whether it was created in your shop, downloaded for free, or purchased from a vendor!

Tech Outlook: A Framework for Automation

Two weeks ago, as part of WhatTheyThink’s fourth annual Technology Outlook Week, our five-day series of webinars that look at the latest trends and technologies in a broad cross-section of the industry, Pat McGrew and Ryan McAbee took a look at software and workflow—specifically addressing automation. In this article, Heidi Tolliver-Walker recaps the webinar.

AI Is Here! Fire Everybody?

Welcome to the rise of the robots—or at least chatbots! Businesses in every segment are looking at how artificial intelligence can help them grow. The anecdotes are becoming part of the mainstream—eliminating staff positions and replacing them with chatbots is a common theme. That begs the question: what happens if you fire everybody and let the bots do the work? Let’s explore that.

Utilizing CRM Tools to Sell Print

A CRM tool needs to deliver value to your sales team in the form of time savings or differentiation in how fast they can get quotes out to their customers.

Manual Steps are Piling Up in Customer Service

When the power dynamic is uneven across the functional areas of your print business, more powerful areas (production and sales) tend to shift manual steps to the less powerful areas (customer service).

Stepping Over Dollars to Pick Up Pennies

We tend to discount the time of our full-time employees because we are paying for it already—looking at them like sunk costs. So, when we ask them to do things that are non-value add (aka a complete waste of their time), we don’t see it as a cost. Well, it has real costs.

DocketManager Aims to Help Customers Spend Time on Profitability: An Interview with Jay Farr

You may remember Jay Farr who founded ePACE in 1985, a mid-range print MIS solution and the first browser-based MIS, that was ultimately acquired by EFI in 2008 (now eProductivity Software). Following his commitments to EFI pursuant to the terms of the acquisition, Jay continued to be a presence in the Print MIS business, and in 2016, became an investor and the VP of Business Development for DocketManager. We recently spoke with Jay to learn more about this unique MIS solution.

Deciding What’s Important

In a print plant, it is easy to come to work and fall into the drama of getting jobs out the door. There is always something you can focus on in your day-to-day work life. The art of moving your business forward happens when you direct your focus to areas of your business that you can impact the most.

This Plant Wouldn’t Run Without Me

In conversations with a label converter recently, the General Manager told me that more than once in the last few years key employees had voiced the core belief that “this plant wouldn’t run without me.” Now, you can take this statement a lot of different ways. My initial reaction is concern for the business because the employee that says this is both likely a key player and potentially a risk.

Women’s Networking Luncheon Kicks Off Annual Event at ePS CONNECT

This year’s CONNECT event, hosted by eProductivity Software at The Wynn in Las Vegas, featured a Women’s Networking Lunch where women—along with some men—gathered to hear the stories of powerful women and discuss ways to get more women into the industry and leadership positions.

Executive Q&A: Nick Benkovich, Vice President Of Product Management at eProductivity Software

WhatTheyThink talks to eProductivity Software’s Nick Benkovich about how print businesses’ software needs are changing in response to changing customer needs.

Keep the Napkin: What Started as a Small Idea Turned into a Multimillion-Dollar Company

Software is the future of every printing business. At More Vang, it’s the present. More Vang president Jon Budington explains how More Vang went from commercial printer to software developer.

Working Over Your Workflow: 5 Steps to Turn Your Digital Printing Workflow into a Profit Maximizer

Reviewing your workflow on a regular cadence can lead to continuous improvement. It can also lead to continuous savings! With every new software tool and every new device there will be opportunities for more efficiency and optimization. Here is how to build your profit maximizer.

Small Business’ Growing Investment in DIY Marketing Software Creates Opportunities for Savvy Printers

Increasing numbers of small and mid-sized businesses are investing in DIY marketing automation. Platforms such as MailChimp, Pardot, and HubSpot lower the barrier to entry, but without the marketing and database expertise to put them to use, those tools are little more than window dressing. Heidi Tolliver-Walker explains how understanding where and how to plug in can be of significant value to those customers.

Off-the-Shelf Software Is No Solution: How to Customize a Software Solution That Solves Your Workflow Needs

With the shifting market directions of procurement and print production there is a lot to be learned about the new requirements, processes, and pain points of the customer base. Building a “one size fits all” solution will usually fall short of those goals. Ultimately the solution needs to fit the specific needs of a PSP and their customer and partner relationships.

Stop Buying Sticky Notes: Print Software Providers Are Developing Software to Evolve with Your Company

Senior Editor Cary Sherburne looks at how print software solution providers are responding to the evolving needs of customers.

The Labor Challenge of Print Software Expertise

Printers are complaining of the lack of qualified candidates and a higher-than-expected amount of turnover. While this section of WhatTheyThink is titled Software, the focus is often more on people than software. After all, people are what make your software investments' ROI. Software is simply potential.

Buying a Print MIS/ERP is an Event, ROI is a Journey

A Print MIS/ERP purchase is an event; the journey is where actual differentiation takes place. 

Bring Agility to Your Print Business with First Line Software

It can be challenging for print businesses to be agile, particularly production printing rooted in small-batch, custom manufacturing. To reach the peak of business agility, you may need to be agile using software and software services. Pat McGrew and Ryan McAbee look at how First Line Software’s custom software and data solutions can help improve print business agility.

Flagship Press Achieves Efficiency and Sustainability with KODAK PRINERGY, COLORFLOW Pro, and INSITE Horsepower

Flagship Press prints everything from books to direct mail, large format to promotional products, because they embrace their range of offset and digital equipment. But their workflow was slow, hard to maintain, and needed more of the features their volumes demanded. They started the search for a faster more automated workflow. In this case study, written and sponsored by Kodak, the answer was Kodak.

Standardized vs. Tailored Implementation Services

Optimization efforts can often result in generalized approaches that miss the mark of delivering what each customer needs, when they need it, based on their specific business needs.

Focus on Everything But Printing: Your Manufacturing Workflow Is the Ticket

Putting ink or toner on a vast range of substrates is something PSPs do daily, and the process is getting a bit easier every year. What is not getting any easier are the operational processes required before and after printing. Pat McGrew and Ryan McAbee explain how job onboarding, proofing and approval, and invoicing are the three most consistent problem areas found during workflow assessments for every type of print service provider.

Multiple Best of Breed Software Systems

More software systems create more complexity, which creates more overhead in your business. Choose wisely based on the realistic and mandatory feature sets required to run your business.

Knowing the Most vs. Willing to Learn the Most

A willingness to learn can be greatly enhanced by creating a safe environment for mistakes to happen. Documented processes are a tool that removes shame and blame from work mistakes and helps the organization get better.

Color Me Frustrated: Users React to Adobe, Pantone Rift Over PMS Libraries

Designers and others who were accustomed to hearing Adobe’s creative software natively speaking Pantone’s language of color are now listening to a dialog that comes with an unanticipated price tag. As a service to its members and to the industry in general, Printing Industries Alliance presents this overview of the situation and its consequences for end-users.

PRINERGY Workflow Has Many Different Facets

In mid-October, the European members of the Graphic Users Association met up in Munich after a three-year, COVID-induced hiatus to explore together the far-reaching potential of the new KODAK PRINERGY platform, benefiting from the extensive expertise of workflow professionals, and learn about both new and existing but unexplored features and tools to help customers further develop their business success. This article, written and sponsored by Kodak, recaps the highlights of the conference.

Asking Your Employees About Their Challenges

Diving into your business to mine ROI out of your processes is best done with your ears and your eyes. Observe and listen to how the processes are being managed today, then step back and choose the challenges that return the most ROI for your business.

When Solutions Cause More Problems

Solving challenges in your print business that involve your software solutions can be tricky because your team has a strong bias to how you are currently working and generally no experience of how other companies are utilizing the software.

The Reality of SaaS & the Delusion of Software Ownership

You can’t buy software like a press. It must keep moving with the technology infrastructure, the market, and your business. SaaS is a subscription model that better matches the reality of the way you need software to keep evolving.

Gaining Alignment: Slowing Down to Speed Up

Issues arise whenever you’re trying to work with a team. Do you have a safe and consistent method for identifying issues and processing them so that your business can stay in alignment?

Diversified Sales Channels (B2B vs. B2C)

The print industry has focused on diversification on the production floor (e.g., digital, offset, oversized, flexo, web, etc.). It’s time to look at diversification in your sales channels—how you get new customers.

New Software Tools: Gateway to Business Transformation

Transforming your business can happen incrementally by looking at the daily workflows you execute on and finding areas of improvement. New software tools are a great time to transform your workflows.

Print Software Product Spotlight: Web-to-Print Solutions that Adapt to Your Needs with Customer’s Canvas

Sometimes the hardest part of taking advantage of the available marketplace is having tools that work they way you need them to. One size does not fit every situation. That is where Customer’s Canvas comes in. The team at Aurigma work with their clients to craft the web-to-print solution that will work most efficiently for their business.

Integrated Workflows Crossing Multiple Vendors

The building of integrated workflows continues to get more complex and require more, not less, vendors. Your decision-making approach must be balanced between solving specific needs and integration up and downstream.

Three Audiences, One Objective “Change”

Change can be difficult. You can make it a little easier by dividing up the constituents and hearing from their unique perspectives, basically giving them the airtime they deserve.

Sales-Driven Change

You have change agents: they are your sales team. A group of people who are selling change every day. Use that team to help sell internal change whenever possible.

Changing Your Customer’s Behavior

Your customers require selling even after they are customers. The selling comes in the form of encouraging them to engage with you in a way that is both convenient for them and improves the outcomes of your workflows.

Fiery Preflight Pro: Troubleshooting Jobs “Within” the Workflow

EFI Fiery DFEs have been driving digital printers for over 30 years. As the digital printers and the market requirements they serve change, there is a need to bring more automated preflight to the production floor to ensure process consistency, EFI has ensured that their DFE meets those challenges with their customers in mind. This includes the newly released Fiery Preflight Pro, available for Fiery FS500 Pro and newer servers.

The Liberation that Comes from Implementing Process

Process or workflow documentation sounds like something only for very large bureaucratic corporations. This is not true. The smallest companies can benefit from process improvement. Your business is a series of processes that are repeated over and over.

Your Building Foundation vs. Your Software/Digital Foundation

Physical foundation has been our collective focus for decades. The print industry creates physical products using physical machines. Digital foundation is our new differentiator: data and systems create new business opportunities and enable you to run your business more efficiently.

Requesting a Demo of Print Software

The software demo is typically a key to the decision-making part of the sales process. Your definition of your core challenges before the demo can greatly influence ROI outcomes in the future.

Finding the Critical Path in Your Assembly Line

You run a print factory, you have an assembly line—find the critical path, then find what’s standing between you and your cash flow. Don’t be surprised if it's way upstream of your press.

Doubling Down on the Print MIS/ERP You Own

Print MIS/ERP systems are a favorite thing to complain about and be frustrated with. This week I am trying to do the impossible: get you to double down on the Print MIS/ERP you currently own instead of throwing it out and starting over.

Selling Features to Your Print Business Software Vendors

Doing a little more work on feature requests can have an oversized impact on the likelihood of getting into a product roadmap.

Your Technology Stack Conflicts with the Workforce Age

There are a lot of differences among the different demographic groups in the labor force colliding right now in your print business. The most critical for your business is both the access to technology throughout their lifetimes and the rate of change of technology in their lifetimes.

The Desire to be “Just a Printer”

The production floor was the centerpiece of print businesses for decades. It determined so much about your business. Capacity, capability, and deliverability times were all dictated by your equipment mix. Today the focus is turning to what customer challenges you can solve in front of the press.

What is Your Competitive Differentiation?

A competitive differentiation is when you’re doing something that your prospect finds valuable that your competitors are not doing.

Software Has to Be Your Answer to Labor Shortages

Labor is forcing us to scale in innovative ways. No more “throwing more people” at every scale problem, it's time to optimize so that you can continue to grow with the team you have.

Why Your Projects Fail (Everything is a Project)

Look at everything as a project and you will find that you need to define everything a lot better. Goals, roles, and constraints get confused with most project and that causes a lot of project failure.

Don’t Get Stuck on One Missing Feature

Evaluating and buying software can be overwhelming, especially if the software segment is mature and therefore has hundreds of features to it. It is hard to keep track of which solution has which features, let alone evaluating if they will work in your environment.

Dreaming vs. Operational Possibility

Total automation is a common dream in the print industry (a custom manufacturing industry where the customer provides a key part of the manufacturing process at the time of purchase!). There are dreams and there is the reality of what is operationally possible with your business (a collection of constraints).

Technology Outlook 2022—The Art and Science of Data in a Workflow

In this year’s third annual Technology Outlook, Pat McGrew and Ryan McAbee look at how to effectively collect and use data to improve production workflows.

Opening to the Realities of a Remote Workforce

Allowing a remote workforce can improve your talent pool as well as force you into fixing your manual process habits.

How Not to Sell Software at Trade Shows

Expos and exhibitions are interesting opportunities to sell, but the event alone is not enough to generate leads or close sales. Selling at trade shows takes a strategy and preparation. In part two of a two-part series, contributor Pat McGrew offers some do’s and don’ts for selling print software at trade shows.

Merging Expertise to Improve Outcomes and Culture

The way you’ve always done it vs. the innovations currently available in the marketplace, mostly in the form of software, can create a lot of tension in your business. Mutual respect for both perspectives is the key to better outcomes.

Heidelberg Launches Prinect Direct

Heidelberger Druckmaschinen is not only a leading offset press manufacturer, but Heidelberg is also a leading provider of workflow solutions as well. In mid-May, the company launched Prinect Direct, a complete revamp of its Prinect print shop workflow, which will now be available in the cloud. European section editor Ralf Schlözer takes a close look at this new release.

Workflow Is the Selling Point at the QMC Group

In the highly competitive commercial print market, the QMC Group continues to thrive. In this article, sponsored by Kodak, learn that one of their secrets to success is that, as they expand organically, they also acquire complementary companies. Those acquisitions bring new capabilities, talent, and the requirement to integrate everyone into a single culture as quickly as possible. And that secret sauce is their workflow.

Making a Commitment to Software Implementation

Commitments are hard. The sales process for print software is like dating. Everyone is full of positive hormones about potential. Then salespeople step away and the implementation begins. It gets hard. It doesn’t go back to the honeymoon phase—ever.

Keeping the Pulse of Your Print Operation with Canon PRISMA Tools

Pat McGrew and Ryan McAbee take an in-depth look at Canon PRISMA Tools for data analysis and accounting, which monitor the operational pulse and direction of your a operation. These tools can help staff take quick and decisive actions to keep production running smoothly and make better print production decisions.

The Challenge of Expertise

Being good at one thing doesn’t make you an expert at everything. Expertise is limited because time is limited, and change is unlimited. Understand what you have expertise in and then respect the expertise of others as a way to optimize your business.

Global Graphics Smart QI: New Platform for On-the-Fly Inspection

Press speeds, resolutions, and the use of variable data is growing, and with it the need to inspect the print for defects before it comes off the press and goes into finishing and converting is essential. Global Graphics Smart QI is a solution targeted at that increasing and demanding requirement.

A Fierce Attachment to the Status Quo

We all know our businesses have lots of room for improvement, yet when faced with change we often have an unreasonably fierce attachment to the status quo. This happens in every business and leadership is the only anecdote. In this time of tremendous change, it is critical to apply leadership to overcoming your employee’s fierce attachment to the status quo.

Real Process Improvement vs. Automation “Buzzwordolgy”

Real change, real business value comes in the form of process improvement. It is incremental vs. revolutionary. Remember, change is often limited by the pace in which the people working in your organization can digest it. Incremental change often takes root, revolutionary change faces fierce resistance and often gets fully rejected by it.

Six Questions for eProductivity Software

eProductivity Software (ePS) may be a new name, but their software solutions for packaging and print have been driving the industry for more than 30 years. This article reintroduces ePS to the market.

The Buy-a-Different-Print-Software Solution

Inflexibility is what causes most of the headaches with print software. When your business doesn’t flex, you are at the mercy of software vendors and their commercial print software solutions.

Print Business Constraints

Constraints have always been present in our print businesses. Today, new ones seem to be getting introduced at what can feel like an alarming rate. Understanding how you can put you and your business in a position to respond to new constraints is the differentiator.

Workflow Automation Product Spotlight: EFI Fiery JobFlow—Job Prep and Prepress Automation Made Easy

Automated workflows are discussed a lot, yet the vast majority of print service providers still don’t have a comprehensive job preparation and prepress automation workflow in their operation. Fiery JobFlow is an easy to install and easy to use solution.

Print MIS Product Spotlight: PressWise

Jennifer Matt takes an in-depth look at PressWise by SmartSoft, a print MIS built simply as a system to remove touchpoints in a digital printing workflow.

When IT Drives Operational Decisions

When I think about operations in a print business, I think about the end-to-end business process “order entry to invoice.” The operations of getting jobs out the door and cash in the bank as another way to put it. This business process encompasses a lot of different functional areas of your business, many people, and a handful of software technologies.

What D’Ya Know About Your Software Investments?

Software is the hidden infrastructure in every business. Without a common understanding in both the business and production teams that installed software tools are to be used and not circumvented, the business cannot have a clear understanding of inbound orders, scheduling, work-in-progress, bottlenecks, shipments, and invoicing. Pat McGrew explains how to get everyone on board.

Buying New Print Software

There is much in your control when it comes to choosing the right print software package for your business. It has nothing to do with counting features. It has everything to do with your approach to engaging with the vendor, learning from other printers who already have the solution, and choosing your team wisely.

What is Your Integration Strategy?

When you move to integrating with software systems external to your business (e.g. at your customers or your suppliers), it’s time to think about your integration strategy or architecture. You can waste a lot of time and money redoing the same thing repeatedly or you can have a strategy that simplifies how you interact with external systems and reuse components each time.

Data Collection Obsession: Measuring Results vs. Activities

Don’t delude yourself into thinking measuring more metrics in your company will magically fix broken processes. Measuring more doesn’t fix things, it simply identifies that there are more problems to fix.

Observability 101: If It Moves, Measure It—And Use Tools to Act on That Data

From digital storefronts, to workflow, to hardware, modern print production systems now support the ability to monitor the state of system. We now have a tremendous amount of data at our fingertips. Using modern observability techniques, we can use data from software and hardware to make business and operation decisions that create better buying experiences for our customers and make production efficient and more profitable.

Remote Workers in Your Print Business

We’ll never go back to a preset “normal.” No matter what change happens, there is always this collective delusion that things will return back to a previous state. When COVID started, I admittedly thought we would be sheltering in the place for a few weeks. We are now so far past a few weeks and so far away from a pre-COVID normal, it's hard to even remember what that felt like.

InfoFlo Print Is Your All-In-One MIS and Web-to-Print Order Management System

In this article, written and sponsored by InfoFlo Print, learn about the fully integrated MIS and web-to-print order management system specifically built for print shops, offering unique features and integrations not found in any other Print Management system.

Who is Your Print MIS/ERP Administrator?

The Print MIS/ERP administrator role in your print business is a strategic differentiator. You want as much independence and ability to move at your own pace as possible from the software vendor.

Data Integrity in Your Print Business

I feel a little like a broken record regarding the importance of data integrity in your Print MIS/ERP. It seems like I write an article about it a couple times a year. It isn’t getting any better out there and it’s only getting more important to your print business’s ability to profitably scale and innovate.

Self-Service Resistance in the Print Industry

Self-service is a strategic move. It takes leadership. The status quo is a powerful resistance machine which should not be underestimated.

Remove the Pain of Peak Production with HP Site Flow

Printers often experience the pain of peak—that time when capacity is at its limit, and even minor issues become significant. This article, written and sponsored by HP, looks at HP Site Flow, a software platform that automates processes from beginning to end, while providing tools to effectively manage the production floor and track the work to meet business goals.

How to Work Better with Print Software Technical Support

Using a software support desk is not anyone’s favorite activity. You have more control than you think over your ability to get what you need via your software vendors support desks.

Software’s Role in Helping Your Business Through Labor Challenges

Business processes controlled via trusted software systems are the best defense against the ever-tightening labor market.

Automation Starts with Your Print MIS/ERP

Automation is about finding recurring patterns and then taking them out of the hands of humans and into the realm of software so that repetitive tasks can be done programmatically—and “programmatically” automating anything in your business will inevitably involve your Print MIS.

Measuring What Matters to Drive Optimal Behavior

The default approach to working is to just show up and respond to inputs. But what’s the non-default approach to work? Goal setting, which is more important than ever because we’re all drowning in our inputs. Prioritization is critical and goals help us prioritize.

Teamwork in a Challenging Labor Market

Teamwork can be a differentiator for recruiting and hiring in a tough labor market. Technology can help set up the conditions (trust and transparency) that make teamwork possible.

You Can Work from Anywhere, But Can Your Technology Keep Up?

New technology solutions have opened the doors that allow work to get done from anywhere and on virtually any device, providing the resources needed to keep businesses moving ahead. Terry Antinora, VP and General Manager, Workplace Solutions Offerings at Xerox, discusses technologies that support a decentralized workforce, placing productivity at the forefront.

Trying to Learn Complex Print Software by Calling Support

You can’t learn a Print MIS system by calling the support desk. One ticket at a time is not an ideal learning environment. Internal expertise and the ability to optimize your print software investments delivers value directly to your bottom line.

Plan for Profitability with PlanProphet

This Product Spotlight looks at PlanProphet, a specialized, complementary solution to your print MIS that acts as your business virtual assistant. Powered by the industry-leading Salesforce CRM, PlanProphet is a cloud-based subscription software that analyzes customer data and behaviors to identify trends and automate touchpoints.

Product Spotlight: Canon PRISMAprepare Go

Jennifer Matt takes an in-depth look at Canon’s PRISMAprepare Go pre-production workflow solution that can be deployed and optimized in a small print facility whose primary business is processing small “upload and print” orders.

Root Cause Challenges in Print Software

Sometimes the way you’ve been managing your core business data in your Print MIS/ERP is fundamentally broken. This has a ripple effect across your business, so it’s worth the effort to clean it up. Stop ignoring the crack in your business foundation.

Your Existing Technology Stack Matters

Your existing technology stack should be one of the most important factors in making decisions about new software solutions and new automation projects.

Tilia Labs: Reaching Maximum Velocity with Intelligent Printing

Small print jobs have been on the rise, even as many of the pre-production processes have remained unchanged. This article explores how intelligent planning software solutions like those from Tilia Labs can help PSPs better manage the influx of smaller jobs and optimize print production.

Assessing the Validity of a “Must-Have” Software Feature

“Must-have” features typically are not worthy of holding up a launch or delaying the utilization of software. The best way to assess the importance of features is to start using the software, then you stop assessing “theoretical” importance.

Web-to-Print Product Spotlight: MyOrderDesk by Print Reach

Jennifer Matt takes an in-depth look at Print Reach’s MyOrderDesk, a product that has not only stood the test of time but has now become a foundation block in Print Reach’s automation strategy, with a feature set that clearly reflects a product that has evolved with the times and continues down that path.

Is There a Workaround?

You can use software as it was designed, or you can stand your ground and request workarounds to force the software to work like you do today. Your flexibility has a greater impact on your business outcomes. Using that flexibility to optimize software utilization is the most powerful lever in your toolbox.

Do You Have a Sales Dashboard?

Sales teams are under increasing pressure to handle more accounts, grow those accounts, and deliver on margins. As a result, sales performance software has become a huge business. Pat McGrew rounds up some leading sales dashboard applications.

The Automation Journey

Automation is about changing a business process. Focus on the business process, involve the people operating the business process today. Keep full automation as a goal, drive incremental improvement as the strategy.

Change Is Hard, but So Is Winning

From sales to estimating to order entry, Modern Litho’s processes had been steeped in manual touchpoints, and they realized that they needed to upgrade their front-end technology. In this article, sponsored by Kodak, Modern Litho’s Jeff Davidson chronicles the company’s search for and implementation of a new MIS.

Print Business Growth via Self Service

Self-service is an unsettling concept in the traditional business-to-business print world where growth is achieved by pivoting on every custom request from your customers. Online, self-service businesses embrace constraints and reap the benefits in their bottom line.

Web-to-Print Product Spotlight: Liftoff

Jennifer Matt takes an in-depth look at Liftoff, not a traditional web-to-print solution, but one that has expanded its feature set into other software areas (e.g., CMS, ERP). For example, the Liftoff product suite allows you to create content like blogs on your web-to-print solution.

Marketing Your Way to Sales Growth

Sales is being reinvented in the age of self-service. When the customer can make a buying decision without parental supervision (aka a sales representative), you can turn marketing into a sales engine.

Software Expertise Turnover at the Printer

When you lose a press operator, you know what to do. What happens when you lose your Print MIS administrator?

Fear of Launching Customer Facing Software

Launching a new way of interacting with our customers can be scary. It is also the best way to learn how to iterate the solution going forward. The sooner you realize you don’t know how your customers are going to utilize new tools, the better for your business. It makes you a better listener and helps your customers feel heard.

Our Unique Attachment to Paper

The products we produce are on paper, so paper is part of our business. Yet we need to break our attachment to the analog (paper) as a tool for running a dynamic custom manufacturing business.

Understanding the Human Resistance to Technology Change

Projects like a Print MIS/ERP transition always create resistance to change. The most common resistance to change is fear but it generally is disguised under a barrage of logical objections.

The Goal of Automation Drives Process Improvements

Automation is the sexy sales and marketing term. Process improvement is where the magic happens. Keep your reality hat on and think about automation at the discrete task level of your business process.

Your Business Constraints and Print Business Software

Constraints are real. You can feel limited by them or you can decide to work with them in a way to maximize your results. No business is without constraints. With print software, humans and existing software are critical constraints to embrace.

The Cult of “Busy-ness” in Your Print Business

Being busy doesn’t equate to business success. Is your busy-ness leading you in the right direction? Or are you being led by your inputs? Prioritization takes uninterrupted time and discipline, it results in your activities having strategic direction.

Print MIS Product Spotlight: EFI’s Midmarket Print Suite

This Print Software Product Spotlight looks at EFI’s Midmarket Suite. EFI’s “suite” approach to software solutions essentially pre-packages a group of products that already work together to solve end-to-end workflows.

Buying Strategic Software Features

A strategic feature of software is a value driver that generally has prerequisites in order to reap the benefits of the feature. The sales process generally skips the prerequisites (for obvious reasons). It is your responsibility as the buyer to understand precisely what it will take to reach the potential.

Print MIS Product Spotlight: Lift Software

Lift Software Print MIS/ERP was invented inside a large wide format printer. That alone will tell you a lot about how Lift perceived the challenges of running a print business. For most Print MIS solutions, supporting wide format has been an add-on to a more traditionally focused offset or digital print manufacturing focus. For Lift it is clearly a deep specialty.

The Print Geeks: Color Control 101

Highlights of a recent Print Geeks webinar in which resident geeks Jim Raffel and Shelby Sapusek of ColorCasters were joined by contributor Dan Gillespie of Alder Color Solutions to discuss five common areas where color management fails in the world of inkjet printing.

Software Enabled Automation: What? Why? and How?

Software has evolved to allow automation with developers. Print businesses can take advantage of this if they invest in technical leadership and give them a seat at the decision-making table.

Document Your Processes—or Continue to Wing It?

The documentation of your repeating processes will change your business in so many ways. No matter how inefficient you might be today, the simple act of documenting processes and committing to iterative improvements will turn your business into a continuous improvement engine.

Power Your Print Business with Analytics

From the moment new work enters the business to delivery and invoicing, printing businesses are a mix of orchestrated and structured activities and ad hoc business decisions. Savvy print operations leverage smart automation because every touchpoint brings potential delays and costs. In this article, sponsored by Kodak, learn about implementing comprehensive automation that uses the power of artificial intelligence (AI), including Machine Learning (ML), to collect more data and provide deeper insight.

Print Software Feature Overlap

Software solutions have features that overlap and are outright solving the exact same issues. Just be careful of the tendency to assume that a small feature means more than it really does. Be wary of where the feature gets done in your workflows.

Leveraging Automation and Industry 4.0 in Print and Packaging Manufacturing

Stakeholders in print and packaging have a new awareness that automation and Industry 4.0 will be what’s going to keep their companies competitive. It may be true, as it was for Granpak, a large packaging manufacturer, that implementing an MIS/ERP can impact an organization WITHOUT spending any additional money on machines or additional personnel.

What Problem are You Asking Print Software to Solve?

Lots of activity, little in the way of results is often the situation when your culture jumps to solutions without defining the problem first. Pause, say the problem out loud. Ask others to say it in their own words. Don’t move to the “how” until you all agree on the “what.”

Are You Buying the Wrong Software? Valuable Tips to Tell!

It is very possible that the software in your workflow is not the best fit for your business! Business workflow suites and production workflow suites can be found for every size and type of business and at every price point. You can even find freeware for some of your common tasks. But just because it looks good and meets your budget doesn’t mean it’s the software for you. Pat McGrew explains how and why.

Small to Medium Sized Printers are Good2Go in the Cloud

Print shops with under 20 employees have typically been left behind when it comes to automation tools. However, the environment is changing quickly, and cloud-based solutions, such as Good2Go, opens the door to automation for printers of any size.

Designating Your Print Software Expert(s)

Who is in charge of your print software solutions? The small step of simply assigning an individual goes a long way towards truly owning the software tools that run your business.

How to Participate in Industry 4.0 Part 4: The Smart Factory

In this fourth article in this series, we continue to look at Industry 4.0, not as a marketing term, but in an actionable way so that you can begin or continue to prepare your company and participate in the many benefits today and tomorrow. In this article, we pause the background education and take a look at some currently available solutions and a peek into futures.

How to Keep Your Customers with Software

As part of our preview of next week’s Technology Outlook Week, Pat McGrew looks at how your workflow infrastructure and the software that supports it can foster customer loyalty.

Leveraging the Cloud and Cybersecurity in Today’s Marketplace

According to recent research from Keypoint Intelligence, the top investment areas for IT decision-makers in the United States include cloud-based solutions and cybersecurity. This article explores how print service providers can leverage these and other areas to better meet their customers’ ever-changing print requirements.

Print MIS Product Spotlight: Sabre Limited/Reseller of PrintVis

The PrintVis Print MIS/ERP is an offering that combines a globally recognized ERP system from Microsoft (Dynamics 365 Business Central), with the print industry specific addon from PrintVis, and in this article we’re featuring Sabre Limited as the implementation partner.

Software Success: Equal Parts Strategy and Execution

Where are you headed? What is your strategic goal? Then who is going to execute on all the tasks required to reach that goal. Strategy + execution plays a part in almost every project you take on in your business—especially print software projects.

Replace Training & Support with Learning

Training is not learning. Training is something you hire other people to do to you. Learning is something that you do. Start building a learning culture now in your print business; it is the only defense to the acceleration of change in our industry.

Print MIS Data Integrity Matters

The integrity of your print business data is a foundational building block of your business. It impacts how fast you can move. Lack of data integrity is like an anchor your business has to drag around—it slows almost every aspect of your business down.

The Color Challenge and How to Solve it

Color correction is a repetitive, time-consuming, and complex process. This article, sponsored by HP and written by HP Indigo's "Workflow Chef" Gershon Alon, explains how to optimize color correction, focusing on two aspects: automation and simplification.

Buying a New Print MIS is Not Your First Step

Replacing your Print MIS might be one of the most important projects you take on in the history of your business. Shopping is not the first step. Assessing your data and your processes is ideally done before you start interacting with software sales representatives.

Can Measuring OEE Improve Your Productivity?

It seems like everyone is talking about “OEE” these days. This article, sponsored by HP and written by HP Indigo's "Workflow Chef" Gershon Alon, explains how OEE is a standard way to measure the “overall equipment effectiveness” of a manufacturing process—in this case, the printing process.

It’s the Technology Laggards That Cost You the Most

Laggards are people in your company who have stopped learning and actually insist on doing their job in the same way they have been doing it, and for one reason: it’s the way they’ve been doing it. Investing in your laggards to drive software utilization is a good investment.

Print Business Front Office Modernization: Part 5—Payment

You getting paid is as much a part of your customer’s experience as placing the order. Make every effort to streamline how much customer time you consume. A vendor that is easy to do business with creates loyal customers.

Print Business Front Office Modernization: Part 4—Artwork

You can’t start printing until you have approved artwork, but you don’t have complete control over this step in the process. You can optimize your press and finishing processes down to the second, yet you might wait three full days for artwork approval. The best you can do is make it as easy as possible for the customer to respond in a timely manner. Don’t confuse them, don’t make them work, and don’t underestimate convenience.

Print Business Front Office Modernization: Part 3—Orders

How are orders managed before they hit the press? In this third part of a five-part series, Jennifer Matt defines the complete order process from initial inquiry to invoice payment. This means a great deal of the process happens in the carpeted area of your print business.

Three Buyer and Seller Rules: Feedback Worth Sharing on Selling Your Software!

Pat McGrew responds to feedback she received from a recent article on selling software, shares some ill-fated buyer stories, and draws up  “three rules for software buyers” and “three rules for software sellers.”

Automation for the Win!

Automation is the next step in a successful future. It enables print service providers to tackle a growing number of print orders with the greatest efficiency and accuracy. Beyond having financial and practical benefits, it can be yet another differentiator that helps organizations stand apart from their competitors. This article discusses the most common benefits of automation and offers insights into how to overcome the challenges associated with implementing it.

The Job’s Not Finished ’til It’s Finished and Out the Door

Is your finishing operation holding your business back? Or depressing your margins with labor-intensive processes or waste caused by bindery errors? Are finishers disconnected islands in your workflow automation? This article, the third in a series sponsored by EFI, explains how to integrate the printing operation with nearline finishers to complete automation from prepress to finishing.

Print Business Front Office Modernization: Part 2—Prospects and Customers

Think about your front office in terms of what “objects'' you need to manage there. In part 2 of a five-part series, we discuss customers and prospects. This means tracking sales activities and inserting more valuable information (both quantitative and qualitative) into your Print MIS regarding your customers.

So…You Want to Buy Some Software!

More and more printing companies are engaging with workflow automation solutions, which tend to bring better margins and often increase available capacity with current equipment. This is a path open to all companies—but walk carefully. In this feature, Pat McGrew explains how to evaluate your current software environment and what areas can offer the biggest returns.

Print Business Front Office Modernization: Part 1—Guiding Principles

This article, the first of a five-part series on the modernization of your print business front office, starts with some guiding principles and then discuss the various “objects” that are managed by the carpeted area of your plant.

Want Growth? Then Automation is What You Seek!

The increase in digitally driven on-demand printing, combined with the flexibility of online ordering, has greatly increased the number of print orders—often at lower print volumes—that a print service provider must manage and produce. This article explores how PSPs that increase their levels of automation now may be able to reap disproportionate rewards in the future.

Prepress Automation Made Easy

If you have taken the first steps to automating your workflow, you will have seen significant benefits from software you had likely already invested in. In this article, sponsored by EFI and the second in a series, explores how to take your workflow automation to the next level by examining your prepress operation to uncover bottlenecks that require extra labor and slow the production process.

Considering a Non-Print-Specific MIS/ERP

If you run a print manufacturing business, chances are you should invest in a print-specific MIS/ERP solution. However, proceed carefully if you insist on adopting a generic MIS/ERP software solution. Don’t get caught up in paying for customizations that are expected features for a print business.

So…Someone Wants to Buy Your Software

Selling software is not like selling hardware. Pat McGrew offers tips and suggestions for acquiring the skillset needed to successfully sell software solutions.

So Your Print Sales Team Isn’t Very Technical

Technical skills are important in every functional area of your print business and sales is no exception. Every salesperson needs to be able to calmly and strategically uncover business challenges and communicate these challenges to your technical resources without limiting potential solutions or setting unreasonable expectations with the customer.

Print Software and 2021’s Business Trends

Working from home, data as an asset, and automation: three business trends and their specific impact on print businesses.

Customer Segmentation in Your Print Business

Understanding your customer segmentation and even more importantly the “jobs” the printed products do for your customers can help you better target your sales efforts. Diversity is a hedge against catastrophic market segment collapse (another lesson of COVID-19).

Print Software Feature Requests: You’re a Priority, Just Not the Only Priority

Feature requests are popular. The default response to new software to ask for it to be changed to fit the way you specifically think it should fit into your specific environment. “Change your processes to optimize your use of the software” is the one statement that would save the print industry millions of dollars.

A Dynamic Print Business

The printing industry is becoming more dynamic—not just as it relates to COVID-19 but in general. Everything is moving and increasing in velocity. Our ability to thrive in this environment requires a dynamic business approach, one that is characterized by constant change. A business must adjust according to its current conditions. This is a path to systemizing a dynamic business, one that is characterized by constant change—but a constant change that doesn’t leave your people behind.

IT Integrations with Your Customer’s ERP

Integrate with your customers’ systems so that your technologies have relationships just like your people have relationships. The more ties that bind you and your customers together, the less likely you will divorce!

COVID-19 Sales Strategy: Think of Your Customer’s Customer

Selling during the pandemic is like selling during a widespread economic downturn. You have to figure out the market segments who are least impacted or, in COVID-19’s case. find the companies who are positively impacted. Directing your sales efforts is critical to closing new business.

The Future of Print Customer Service

The future of your customer service department still involves skilled labor. In fact, the labor is more skilled than it is today and it will be able to handle more volume because of the self-service tools your customers will have access to. Customer service will turn into customer success—a proactive element to drive more business and maintain loyalty thru convenience.

A Good Year for Software: The New Infrastructure of Your Print Business

WhatTheyThink Print Software section editor Jennifer Matt looks back at the year 2020 in software, some of the trends that emerged from the pandemic, and how software has become an important element in helping print companies adapt and pivot.

Our Customers Don’t Want to Order Online

Humans resist change, even when it provides them real value. If you need a group of humans to change, you have to think about your approach in order to optimize the outcomes. This applies to your existing customers and how they engage with your business.

Print Business Data in 2020/COVID-19

It is hard to think of a time in recent history when we have been so captivated by data. The COVID-19 global pandemic has had us glued to data for the better part of eight months. Data is guiding the day-to-day recommendations of epidemiologists around the world and it will also guide when a vaccine is safe to release. In any industry, a strong data foundation is critical to enable companies to make proactive decisions that will move businesses forward.

COVID-19 Sales Strategy: Think of Your Customer’s Customer

Selling during the pandemic is like selling during a widespread economic downturn. You have to figure out the market segments that are least impacted or, in COVID-19’s case, find the companies that are positively impacted. Directing your sales efforts is critical to closing new business.

User Adoption and a Useful Crisis (COVID-19)

A crisis is also an opportunity, and COVID-19 is no exception. The rate of adaptation taking place is one of the most powerful forces at play in 2020. Entire populations are expanding their comfort zones with online tools, remote learning, and working from home.

Is Your Management Software Ready for Industry Convergence?

As print service providers (PSPs) onboard more applications supporting a diversified set of customers and industries, it becomes more of a challenge to manage the unique requirements of those industry segments with a single business management tool. PSPs looking to expand into new markets and applications must ensure that their business management system is up to par. This article explores how these systems must adapt to support the requirements of the future.

COVID-19 Spurs Proofing Innovation at Continental Web Press—and Wins New Business

When clients are used to traveling for press checks of color-sensitive documents, then a global pandemic severely hampers business travel, how do you continue to meet the needs of those clients? You create a brand-new proofing solution. At least, that’s what you do if you’re Continental Web Press.

The Death of Paper-Based Processes

Your business processes need to move off of paper and into software. This was important before COVID-19, and like everything else, COVID-19 has simply accelerated this trend. Paper is no longer a viable business process medium.

Selling Print is Never Going Back to Normal

Sales is never going back to normal. The pandemic didn’t create anything new—it simply accelerated what was already happening. Evolve your sales team now; donuts and face to face meetings aren’t coming back.

Web-to-Print Product Spotlight: Propago

Most web-to-print software solutions are built inside software companies. Propago was built inside a large commercial printer. This is a unique origin story for a software platform and it tells us a lot about how and why features made it into the Propago product. Print Software Section Editor Jennifer Matt takes a close look at Propago’s web-to-print solution.

Decision Fatigue in Software Implementations

Making decisions wears us out, even easy decisions like what to wear, what to eat for breakfast. Decision fatigue is something we need to manage especially when it comes to projects that require lots and lots of decisions (like Print MIS implementations). 

Selling Web-to-Print Portals

Web-to-print portals are the enabling technology behind a “print program” which can elevate your relationship with your customers from transactional to relational. That relationship becomes “stickier” when technology is embedded into the customer’s organization.

One Login Per Customer!

Don’t make your customers think. Don’t make your customers administer multiple logins in order to do business with you. Don’t make your online engagement a burden on your customers.

Successful Print Software Implementation Mindset

Don’t have a mindset like a lighthouse. Have a mindset like a fast, nimble, ship with the most advanced navigation systems. When navigating the waters of the print manufacturing industry, stationary businesses will not survive.

Adult Learning at Your Print Business

Like it or not, all work involves learning. Not like our education system, but self-directed, project-based learning. You have to be a self-learner and as a leader you have to hold your people accountable for self-learning.

Process Creators vs. Process Followers

As your business matures and grows, you will need to improve your processes. As software invades every corner of your business, your processes have to change to adapt to the new reality. You need to know who in your company is a process creator.

Automating Imposition: Agnostic, Smart, and Easy?

Considering most printing companies have an assortment of presses, finishing equipment, and product types, having disparate imposition workflows is a very inefficient way to manage it. Ultimate has raised the bar again with the just-released Impostrip 2020.

Online Ordering Adoption Begins with Customer Service

Your customer service team is the place to start online ordering adoption. You can practice your sales pitch on them and then teach them how to pitch your customers into a self-service workflow.

The COVID-19 Era Is a Time to Contract and Rebuild Your Print Business

COVID-19 is a challenge and an opportunity to rebuild and make changes to your business that would otherwise be met with the standard “this is how we’ve always done it” line of resistance.

Identifying Important Data Decisions

Data decisions get made everyday in your print business. Here are three examples of important data decisions that we can all learn from.

Partnering! Canva Brings the Creative to Office Depot Customers

Thanks to a new collaboration between the global design platform Canva and the robust workplace solutions team at Office Depot, small businesses can quickly and easily develop creative content for different kinds of print and non-print applications—everything from reports and posters to menus and yard signs, even social media marketing campaigns.

Web-to-Print’s Primary Value is Customer Convenience

Online ordering is about customer convenience. How do you leverage technology and self service to make it easier for your customers to do business with you?

Systemize the Predictable in Your Print Business

Your business is made up of two kinds of processes: predictable ones and exceptions. A well-run business has codified or systematized the predictable business processes so that the humans working in the business apply all their skills to the exceptions.

How Cloud Computing Is Transforming CCM

Will Morgan, Senior Research Analyst for Aspire CCS, provides some key takeaways from a new report that takes an in-depth look at the state of cloud computing in Customer Communications Management (CCM) and highlights opportunities for enterprises and services providers who are ready to modernize their communications strategies.

Partnering to Expand Your Customer Solutions

Partnering can solve challenges that you don’t feel comfortable taking on initially. A partnership also helps you grow your expertise in an area so that when you do expand, you’ll make much better investment decisions.

IT Infrastructure and Software Performance

More and more, the productivity of your company is based on the ability to efficiently work in the software applications that run your business. Don’t hamstring your mission-critical software applications by starving them of the resources they require.

drupa 2021 Essentials of Print: Assessments, Platforms, and Making Money with Workflow

The most expensive things you do in your printing plant every day involve talking to clients and physically touching their work. You talk to clients to better understand the work they want you to do, and you touch the work, in prepress or at other points in the process to ensure that the client’s intent is rendered on to the substrate. But every conversation and every touch has a financial impact. While you rely on workflow tools to aid the process, in most companies there are also spreadsheets, whiteboards, and sticky notes used to gather and communicate information about the jobs-in-progress. It’s only natural! However, the more you talk and touch, the less money you make on the job.

Estimating: Your Customers Least Favorite Aspect of Print Buying

Getting your customer’s pricing is a critical measure of customer satisfaction. Your customer might not be outwardly complaining, but many print customers are migrating to online solutions that provide immediate pricing. Not every job you produce deserves a manual estimate.

Projects: Getting Stuff Done in Your Print Business

Every business has projects. Every business treats them differently. The range is enormous; from no project methodology to bureaucratic craziness. Print businesses of all sizes would benefit from a simple project methodology because it can quickly eliminate the most common reasons why things just don’t get done.

The Print Software Evaluation Process

Evaluating print software is a process that desperately needs to evolve. Step back and look at the business objectives of the evaluation as a starting point to reinventing your approach to purchasing software.

COVID-19's Impact on the Print Sales Process

So many trends are being amplified or accelerated by COVID-19; the evolution of the sales process is one of them. Your customers are being asked again to do more with fewer people and less time. They need vendors/partners that can help alleviate the pressure.

The Print Industry After COVID-19

COVID-19 economic symptoms include the weakening of the “we’ve always done it this way defense”—which will have some positive impacts on outdated printer workflows and some negative impacts when customers evaluate print spend under new market conditions.

The Opportunity of a Crisis (like COVID-19)

There will be a new, new normal after the height of COVID-19 passes. It will be even more reliant on software technologies to connect your employees, your customers, and your suppliers. The time to evolve to this new reality (often referred to as digital transformation) is now—crisis evolution cuts through a lot of the resistance.

What’s in YOUR Workflow?—Part 2: Prepress and Getting on Press

Every type of plant can build a better workflow, one that is efficient and scalable, that helps to save production costs, and adds to operational efficiency. The place to start is with a tour around your plant. Pat McGrew continues her “virtual guided tour” of a plant's workflow, and some key questions to ask at each stop along the way.

The Real Work of Software Optimization

Learning is the real work of software optimization. Once you really learn the application you own it. Once you own it, then you have the chance of reaching its full potential inside your organization.

I Can’t Believe This Is Happening

HP's PrintOS is a cloud-based platform with browser-based and mobile apps that connect to and extend the functionality of HP production printers. There are multiple tools that provide robust analytics, mobile monitoring, access to PrintOS anytime and anywhere, and security.

What’s in YOUR Workflow?—Part 1: File Onboarding and Print Prep

Every type of plant can build a better workflow, one that is efficient and scalable, that helps to save production costs, and adds to operational efficiency. The place to start is with a tour around your plant. Pat McGrew provides a “virtual guided tour” of a plant's workflow, and some key questions to ask at each stop along the way.

COVID-19 Should be Driving Your Digital Transformation

Crisis creates an environment for rapid innovation. The digital transformation of all business sectors was in progress before COVID-19, and the crisis will continue to separate the digital haves and have-nots.

The Who, What, and Why of Print Software

Some basic questions—who? what? and most importantly why?—of print software will greatly increase your chances of optimizing your print software investments.

Understanding the Primary Objective of Print Software

Understanding what the primary objective or challenge that a print software claims to solve is an important factor for shopping for print software solutions. You have challenges, print software vendors have solutions (in the form of products). The better defined the challenge, the better the chance of alignment and return on investment.

Email is Not an Online Print Ordering Solution

We are going to come out of COVID-19 into a different economy and a different print industry. Many of the changes taking place now will persist, even after we’re all vaccinated or have developed widespread herd immunity. Your customers will return with fewer people resources—a competitive advantage will be for vendors who can save customers time.

Overcoming Resistance to Learning New Software Tools

Adult learning is hard especially when you’re transitioning from a toolset that your people have been comfortably using for years. Do not give the resistance any power and do not try to force the new system to work like the old one—you will pay dearly for that in the form of lost productivity.

April Fools & Utilizing Top Talent During COVID-19

First an April fools laugh, then some more insight on how to deploy your best resources during the COVID-19 pause in capitalism.

Strategic Optimization During COVID-19

Documenting your core workflows can be a good strategic use of key resources who might not be fully occupied working from home.

Strategic Software Projects

We find ourselves in difficult times, the conditions of which are delivering a window of opportunity to do strategic projects that will accelerate your business when the economic engine starts running at full speed again.

Printers Need More Selling During Print Software Implementations

The sales process should extend into the implementation of print software because all humans need to be persuaded of the merits so that they can become enthusiastic about the new toolset.

Elevating Foundational Print Software Decisions

There are a lot of decisions to be made around print software; it might surprise you which ones I think are the most important.

Solving All Your Print Software Challenges at Once

It's easy to get into a panic when you wake up to the reality that your approach to software in your print business requires a major overall. It probably took you years to get into this state; don’t freak out because it could take years to crawl out of it. The best thing to do is to calmly prioritize and then start making incremental progress.

Industrial Inkjet Gets RIPPED

In an industrial inkjet environment, a lot of pieces go into creating a specialized solution, but it’s the raster image processor (RIP) that does the heavy lifting. Elizabeth Gooding takes a detailed look at all the criteria to keep in mind when selecting RIP software for an industrial printing workflow.

Print Software Strategic Planning

Your software investments deserve big picture, strategic planning. It’s time to step back and assess your core business processes and how software helps, hinders, optimizes, or ideally automates the steps required everyday to deliver on your customer promises.

The Carpeted Area of Your Print Business

We have spent decades focusing and optimizing the production floor (where there is no carpet). It is time to focus our energies on the carpeted areas of the business which impact customer’s perceptions of our business.

Solving Print Business Challenges with Software

Describe your business challenges: be specific, be precise. Then let go of any attachment to the “how this business challenge gets solved by print software.” You want your business challenges solved. One of the fastest ways to solve them is to describe them accurately and then to be open to all the possible solutions.

Purchasing a Web-to-Print Solution

You purchase software to solve business problems. When evaluating software, keep your focus on the challenges you want to solve. This will keep you open-minded about all the possible ways your challenges might be solved, rather than attachment to one specific solution.

Optimize the Print Software You Own

Treat software like printing press hardware: assume your people and your processes have to change to optimize the new software rather than staying attached to how you think the software should work.

Meritocracy-Based Business Decisions

Technology is invading every corner of the print industry, and many print business owners are novices when it comes to technology. How do you make good business decisions when you are not the subject matter expert? Whom do you listen to? How do you know they are qualified? Run your business like a meritocracy.

Most Adults Don’t Learn Until They Have To

People in your organization have to keep learning new things so that you can continue to optimize your business using new tools (mostly software). Leadership’s job is to deliver the “have to” part of the learning equation.

Future-Proofing Your Workflow

2019 ushered in new levels of interest in improving and automating workflows, but the level of actual implementation was not as high as we would have hoped to see by now. This article explores some of the barriers to workflow automation and offers insight on overcoming them.

What is Your Print Business Differentiation?

What do you provide for your sales team to get the upper hand in the marketplace? Do you have differentiation? Are you investing in something that will not only win new customers but keep existing ones?

The Print Customer’s Narrative

A customer narrative documents the experience of doing business with you—from the sales process all the way through invoicing—from the customer’s perspective.

Color Management: Gandhi, Pop Music, the Human Psyche, and Resolve

How are the players in the print production process like a group of musicians playing on stage? Idealliance CEO Tim Baechle offers advice for filtering out all the noise we are bombarded with and focusing on “playing in time” with others in the supply chain.

Selling Print vs. Selling Web-to-Print Software

Your print sales people need a different perspective when selling web-to-print solutions. They need to understand short vs long term benefits as well as how the customer’s convenience is driving loyalty.

Print Industry M&A and Print Software

The merger of software technology stacks and strategy is a key component to any two businesses coming together. It takes time, effort, and patience as technology is uniquely embedded in a business. Be strategic about what you address and when you address it. Not everything should change right away.

Waiting for Software to Change to Fit Your Business

Software feels malleable. New features come out. Trade shows are packed full of vendors showing the bright new thing that might lure you into the sales process. Complex software (Print MIS) does not change fast (because it shouldn’t), and the sooner you realize that changing your business is a better strategy, the faster you’ll get to the ROI and business differentiation that a Print MIS can deliver.

Training vs. Learning with Print Software

The number one thing we hear when we engage with a printer who is having trouble with their print software (Print MIS, Web-to-Print, or Pre-Press automation) is “we didn’t get trained.” Ironically, more training is rarely the solution to this common complaint.

Solving Software Challenges With Tin Foil

You have a bias for what solutions work; that bias is based on what has worked for you in the past. If you’re a print business owner, buying new stuff feels like a solid way to solve challenges of hiring new employees. Solving print software challenges requires expertise in print software.

A Cloud-Based Software Mindset

We live in a connected world. The artifacts (documents, spreadsheets, etc.) we create for business should be stored centrally with controlled access in the cloud. Isolated artifacts on employees’ computers slow projects down and make research into past projects nearly impossible.

Print Software ROI

Getting the return on investment for print software takes a lot more work by the people at the printer than you are led to believe in the software sales process.

Prioritizing Online Tools for Existing Customers

The dream of an online business that delivers profitable revenue from strangers is a good dream to have. It simply takes a lot of work to be successful at it. I have seen too many printers spend too much time focusing on the software and forgetting that internet traffic is not free or easy to get.

Why Software is Challenging and Expensive

Building good software requires a very desirable skill set in our current economy. Virtually every single company on the planet needs to utilize software in order to increase their efficiency and reach more customers.

Perspectives from Outside Your Print Business

Getting outside perspectives into your print business is important, especially when implementing a Print MIS or other print software. You want people who see a wide variety of print businesses to weigh in on best practices.

MIS/ERP Systems: How Are You Managing Your Business?

The best way to look at MIS/ERP systems is holistically, in the context of the bigger picture of managing your business as a whole. Just as you should have a production workflow system, ultimately an MIS system is a workflow system for your business operations.

New Ryerson University Study Evaluates Expanded Color Gamut Printing

Ryerson University has just published a detailed study of expanded gamut printing, based on a series of extensive tests using commercial color management systems to process and print test forms containing PANTONE spot colors. The author of the study, Dr. Abhay Sharma, presents some of the top-level findings and conclusions.

Solving Print Software Challenges by Borrowing from Other Features

Define the challenge you're trying to solve before you jump into a shortcut that borrows from another feature in your Print MIS or web-to-print. If you borrow too much, you’re implementation of the software will get detached from the vendor’s product roadmap—which can be expensive and painful.

The Migrating Value Chain: Print Production to Software

The value in the print industry today is migrating from the production floor to the mobile device of your customers. How are you investing in providing your customer access to your business from their phone?

Making Brutal Software Feature Decisions

Print software is a pile of features that solve business process challenges. You have to learn how to prioritize what’s the next most important feature in the software by comparing its impact against all the other features.

The Trap of One More Software Feature

Don’t let a feature stop you from implementing what works for you today. Don’t let the people in your organization that are good at looking for all the ways something won’t work win. Implement what works and then find ways around the missing features. Waiting is keeping your business in neutral.

The Primary Reason Print Software Gets Thrown Out

Print software gets thrown out by printers primarily because of factors that are 100% in the printer’s control.

Strategic vs. Tactical Print Employees

Your print business has two kinds of challenges: the challenge of getting jobs out the door (tactical) and the business of continuing to strategically evolve so you maintain relevance and competitive advantage in the marketplace.

RFPs Are Not a Good Way to Procure Print Software

Learning is the most important part of software procurement decisions. The vendor needs to learn about you (to assess if you are a good fit for their solution) and you need to learn about the vendor. An RFP doesn’t facilitate any learning.

The Event the Print Industry Needs

A learning event vs. a selling event—that is the event the print industry needs. An event where you go to solve your challenges through active collaboration, open-minded because nobody is trying to sell you anything.

Email Is a Terrible Way to Communicate (Internally)

Internal communication deserves better tools than email. Real collaboration happens best when more, not fewer, people are involved. Taking internal communication out of email reduces the cognitive overhead of deciding whom to communicate with.

Pricing Software Tools That Enable Print Programs

Your print sales team has to evolve to understand and be able to sell the value of the software that enables print demand from business processes. Every printer should have a direct revenue line for their software.

Hidden Labor Costs of Bad Data

The level of trust you have in the data in your Print MIS impacts all aspects of your business. When printers get their Print MIS to be “trustworthy,” they can move a whole lot faster, with less labor costs, and be more responsive to the never-ending request for more data from all stakeholders in your business.

Choose to Measure Time Spent in Your Print Business

Everyday, most of us choose the most important thing to work on. The employees in the carpeted area of your print business are making these decisions everyday. Do you know what they are prioritizing? Do you know how they are spending their time? You should measure time just like you measure revenues, profits, and costs.

How Timing Impacts Strategic Print Software Decisions

Being strategic about print software is nearly impossible when you are in a crisis. Too many print software decisions are made under duress. When you have the discipline to plan before the crisis, you are being strategic.

Print MIS Product Spotlight: Avanti’s Slingshot

Jennifer Matt reviews Slingshot by Avanti, and feels that its integrated warehouse management, multiple approaches to scheduling, and approach to implementation are its core strengths.

Yesterday’s Workflow Tools: Spreadsheets, Email, and PDFs

The toolset for solving business workflow challenges has completely changed in the last decade. If the only tool(s) you’re deploying are email, spreadsheets, and/or PDFs, you are using yesterday’s tools to solve today’s challenges.

A Conversation About Web-to-Print With Slava Apel, Founder of Amazing Print

If today’s online storefronts and web-to-print workflows don’t look anything like they used to, there’s a reason. The software has advanced leaps and bounds from where it was even a few years ago. This interview with founder and CEO of Amazing Print Tech Slava Apel reflects how the technology is changing...and how it is changing those who use it.

How Clean Is Your Print Business Data?

All print business owners want more data about their businesses so they can make better decisions. It isn’t about reporting packages or business intelligence tools—it’s really about how your business generates data on a daily basis.

Solve Problems Your Customers Care About

I wish all customers’ top priority was purchasing high-quality print; it isn’t. Your customer’s have upstream problems. The printers who go upstream and solve these problems will be rewarded as manufacturers downstream.

A Culture of Accountability to Learning in Your Print Business

Learning is the experience of trying to do something without parental supervision. It is not watching a trainer do something and shaking your head that you understand. Holding your people accountable for learning activities is the most important part of improving user adoption of new tools in your print business.

Pattern Recognition as a Path to Print Business Efficiency

Your print business is rich with patterns. By looking at patterns we can find ways to codify those patterns into processes that make us more efficient. You need real human processing for your business—free this up by taking the recurring stuff off their plates.

Workflow Automation and Standard Operating Procedures

Automation starts with an understanding of the business process and how it’s done “manually.” Documenting this business process is called a “standard operating procedure” which is where you can begin your journey to some level of automation.

Is Your Print Production Lifted by a Platform?

The first platforms appeared over four years ago and have steadily increased their performance, functionality, and partnerships over time. This article explores the characteristics of true print workflow platforms and discusses how platforms can benefit print production.

Buying Web-to-Print Software Under Duress

Your customers want convenience. Printers who prioritize around making it easy to do business with their customers will differentiate themselves. Don’t wait until your best customers demand online ordering and self-service access to the business they do with you—do it proactively and strategically instead of under duress.

Why Do You Need a Print MIS Administrator?

Software is like a press; it needs to be staffed. Software is like a press; it needs to be maintained. Software is like your business; it needs to keep evolving. Your most important piece of software is your Print MIS—dedicate the tasks of your Print MIS to one individual.

Give Your Employees Better Tools

New software tools are often rejected because the humans feel like their jobs are being replaced by computers. Software does math better, faster, and more accurately than humans—that is not debatable. But new tools augment brainpower—not replace it.

The Importance of Uninterrupted Time in a Print Business

Your print business is being invaded by software tools. These tools require a level of thinking/concentration that requires blocks of uninterrupted time for your employees. Without this uninterrupted time, your software will remain grossly underutilized and lacking measurable ROI.

Here Comes the Flood—Going Live with Print Software

Think of your go-live date for your Print MIS as a flood. Prepare for it by training everyone how to create sandbags and then monitoring that everyone actually applied the learning and figured out how to do their jobs in the new system BEFORE go-live.

Saving $1 Million with Workflow

Although printers acknowledge that dealing with a high number of small jobs is a major workflow bottleneck, many have not automated their processes. This article offers some quick tips for getting started with automating processes to aid employees and benefit customers.

Learning Through Engagement at Print Vendor User Conferences

User conferences are a great way to change your perspective and get a break from your day-to-day activities. The learning happens when you engage with both the presenters and the participants.

All or Nothing with Print Software

When buying and implementing print software, start with the simple jobs software does well, implement and learn. Do not get stuck in a myriad of “use case exceptions” as an excuse to do nothing. You will never get ROI and you’ll never find software that can do everything.

Print Estimating is Simply a Time Calculator

A lot of crazy things can happen in estimating departments. But estimating is the foundation of your print business. If your estimates are grossly inaccurate, you risk the utilization of your precious resources for the privilege of losing money. If your estimates are right on target, you are able to make very strategic decisions about customer pricing. Essentially, the estimating department is your profit management center.

Print Business Leadership in the Digital Age

Leading by example is the most powerful way to approach challenging business environments. When the leadership is engaged in constant learning, the culture of the company is much more likely to be a learning organization. If I could pick only one characteristic of a business, it would be learning because if you’re learning, you’re staying relevant against any future changes.

Every Employee in Your Business Needs to Be Technical

Technical people are a differentiator in your business—not just the typical geeks, but technical people at every position in your company. When your print business is staffed by technical people, they have a greater potential to deliver profitable growth.

Print Software Integrations Are Integral to Your Print Business

Integrated software is a requirement for an end-to-end workflow. You will be faced with lots of decisions around integration when you’re purchasing new software tools. Never let integration to be a yes/no question—it requires much more exploration and understanding.

The Manifestations of Fear in Print Software Implementations

Software implementations evoke fear in the minds of your employees—these fears are manifested in a variety of ways. You should be looking for fear, not reacting to the symptoms of fear that cause all kinds of issues with print software implementations.

Selling Print Requires More Than Order-Taking

Your customers expect more than a “print order taker” print sales representative. Successful printers require a sales team that can dig in and learn about their customer’s business processes that involve print. When you understand the business process that print is involved in, you get the opportunity to solve other challenges and create more value for your customers. This is now an expectation of most customers.

Frustrating, Tedious, and Detail-Oriented Print MIS Work

The topic of Print MIS software can be a dangerous topic to bring up if you want to keep things low-key or drama-free. Most printers are really frustrated with their MIS. I’ve been working on customer-facing technology (web-to-print) my whole career—the Print MIS is by far the most important software tool you have in your business.

Understanding the Software Feature Request

Software is never done. It has to keep moving to stay compatible. It operates in business processes that keep changing. The consumer expectation of how fast and easy software can change is being set by some of the most valuable companies on the planet.

Print Business Differentiation

What are you investing in that will result in the true differentiation of your print business? An important question in a market where many commercial printers look alike (same equipment, same sales approach, similar online tools). I think differentiation is about solving additional customer challenges that your competitors don't even know about.

Setting Up Estimating in Your Print MIS

Your Print MIS should be your trusted system of record for your business; the estimating module is the most critical component of your Print MIS. When you implement estimating brilliantly, it provides you a healthy daily dose of ROI forever.

After Your Print Software Strategic Decision

Once you make a print software decision, you have to enforce it by communicating the strategy clearly and then repeatedly. Your people will forget, your business will evolve, sales people will appear from other solutions trying to convince your team of a different path.

Is Your Print Business Freewheeling or Process Driven?

If you make decisions about your business based solely on the intuition of you and your staff, you are limiting the growth and the scale of business learning that can take place in your organization.

Where’s the Flash Point for Cloud Software?

Although the industry has not yet hit a “flash point” that would result in the significant growth of cloud-based software solutions, there are indications that this spark may not be far away. This article explores the growth potential and lingering challenges associated with cloud software.

Optimal Use of Your Web-to-Print System

Your web-to-print solution is underutilized. Do all functional areas of your company—sales, customer service, technology—understand all the challenges your current web-to-print system solves? Probably not. You can’t be “solution focused” without understanding the challenges your toolset solves.

Make Your Print Business a Learning Organization

A print business that learns is one that has a foundation for tracking its business processes and improving on them. From a cultural standpoint, a learning organization has to be able to talk openly about mistakes made from all levels of the organization.

The Hidden Secrets of Print Software Implementation

The implementation of print software is as important as the software itself. With every software tool there is a foundational knowledge that will help you be more self-sufficient. Those printers who understand their software tools succeed in spite of lack of support from print software vendors.

Production Dashboards Can Help Keep You “Out of the Mess”

In the printing industry, production dashboards provide critical and timely information for owners, managers, and operators so they can control the production chaos. This article provides a brief overview of available production dashboards and explores how they can simplify the production process.

Print Ecommerce Data vs. Print MIS Financial Data

The ability to make data-driven decisions is critical to your business success. The various software systems (Print MIS, web-to-print) are your primary tools for managing this data. When you do integrations make sure you keep the control of right data in the right hands.

Web-to-Print Product Spotlight: printQ by CloudLab

Jennifer Matt reviews printQ by CloudLab and its modular approach to web-to-print.

Accurate Press Specifications in Your Print MIS

The process of getting your Print MIS into a “trusted state” can be difficult, but the effort is well worth it. Printers who 100% trust the data in their Print MIS move faster and are more profitable than those who are constantly questioning the data.

Print Software Fit to Your Technology Stack

Print software is a powerful tool to create efficiencies in your business. Your success with print software is dependent upon how well you can make the various technologies work and play together in your overall technology stack.

The Costs of Supporting Multiple Print Software Solutions

Buying more software isn’t always the best option. Duplicate solutions that solve the same set of challenges (e.g. multiple web-to-print solutions) have extra costs and require extra understanding by your sales team. Buying software should be at the same strategic level as buying presses is in your print business.

Make Your Print Business Work Smarter

Working smarter is an evolution. Digital tools are providing us ways to work more efficiently, but it comes down to being able to work with other humans. Efficient communication is the key to working smarter and optimizing the digital tools at our disposal.

Collaborative Print Sales

When sales become more complicated, involving more people on both sides of the equation, you need a team player to facilitate collaboration. A winning sales team is a combination of subject matter expertise and relationship building.

The Impact on the Printer of Software Acquisitions

A disruptive market creates the conditions for acquisitions. This has been happening with printers for years and print software vendors are experiencing the same conditions. As a customer of these products, you must understand the conditions of the acquisition in order to prepare for how it will impact you as a customer of the software.

Buying Print Software is a Marriage

When you invest in software for your print business, it’s like a marriage because you want to have a healthy long-term relationship with the vendor. Changing software is painful and expensive (like divorces).

Volaris Group Makes First Foray into Print Automation Software

The recent acquisition of print automation software provider Aleyant by Canada’s Volaris Group raised some eyebrows in the industry. Who is the Volaris Group? What strategy are they pursuing relative to the printing industry? And what does this acquisition mean for Aleyant? These were questions Senior Editor Cary Sherburne investigated.

Software Tools for Teamwork in Your Print Business

You work with a team. It’s time to upgrade the tools you use to foster more efficient teamwork and better management of the artifacts that are created in projects. Email with attached files doesn’t cut it anymore. We are creating an isolated mess of artifacts that cannot be effectively found or used in the next project.

Adobe PDF Print Engine 5: PDF 2.0 Coming Soon to a DFE Near You

Adobe announced Adobe PDF Print Engine 5, their core technology used by many Digital Front Ends driving print production equipment. This release makes PDF 2.0 print-related features available for OEM implementation.

Succeeding in Spite of Print Software’s Weaknesses

A culture of finding ways to optimize software in your business is something you can control. The successful printers will be the ones who are getting the most of their print software tools—mostly by being open to evolving their own workflows to fit the how the software works best.

Innovation with Print Software

The source of our innovation is moving from the production floor to the customer’s mobile device. We are going from the differentiation based on speed, quality, and finishing to differentiation based on solving customer’s data challenges way upstream of the printing press.

Delivering Relevant Benefits in Print Sales

Sales is about catering your company’s solutions to the specific challenges that are relevant to their current situation. There is no better way to lose a prospect’s attention then to talk about subjects that aren’t relevant to them.

Leadership Is Essential to Web-to-Print Implementations

The transition between sales and implementation of web-to-print systems can be a rough road for the implementation team and the customer. The leadership of the implementation belongs with the printer—all too often the customers take the leadership and run the project off a cliff after spending lots of time and money.

Latest Innovations in Your Print Business

Do your innovation projects take into consideration what would be best for your customers? Your customers want to know that you’re innovating to solve their challenges.

Learn from Print Sales Losses

When you lose a sales deal, how does your company react? Do you have a culture of learning from losses or do you have a culture of blaming? A sales loss is a treasure trove of learning—successful companies evaluate and adjust for their next pitch.

Web-to-Print is a Tool for Your Customers

Prepress automation, streamlining your customer service department, and reducing the time between inquiry and jobs getting on press – these are common feature requests for web-to-print systems. They are all about you (the printer) – web-to-print isn’t about you! Web-to-print is for your customers!

Delegate the Right Jobs to Software

Every industry is being transformed by a new staffing option for the “jobs to be done” and that staffing option is software. Your business needs to get stuff done—some of that stuff needs to be done by humans and a lot of that stuff needs to be done by software.

New Trends in Color Management

Managing color in today’s ever-changing environment has long been a challenge for printers. No two scanners, monitors, or printers will reproduce colors identically, making it necessary to implement specialized color management systems to achieve an exact match across devices. This article explores some of the options that are available for printers.

The Pre-Mortem to a Print MIS Transition

If you’re on your way to embarking on a Print MIS transition, then you need to sit down and pretend the whole thing was a spectacular failure. Once you’re in that uncomfortable place—work backwards and build a plan to prevent its untimely death.

A Big Focus on Small Print Shops

Smaller print shops face many of the same challenges as larger shops, so the need for a single system of record to manage the business is just as critical. Until recently, the only solution was purchasing an expensive print MIS with integration capabilities and pay for professional services to set up the connectivity to the other software solutions. This article explores how things are beginning to change for the better for small print shops.

Your Customer’s Workflow Challenges are Your Opportunities

There is a conflux of pressures on businesses today: increase speed, personalize products, respond to the market faster, localize the messaging, and do all this with less people on a tighter budget. Read on for tips on how to cope with these challenges.

"Do I Have to Go Through an Account Manager?"

Our important customers get our attention and our dedicated resources. What happens when customers prefer online tools over dedicated resources? Read on to find out.

Embedding Real Print Workflow Change

A print software application can do certain jobs for your business. Once you’ve proven it works, don’t forget to execute. Deploy the software so it does that job across your entire organization. Read on to find out how.

The Culture of Business Meetings

The meeting is a tool that should be used sparingly. It is expensive. It is for a specific purpose (alignment, understanding, status check-in, etc.). It is overused and the art of running a good meeting is underrated.

Productivity and the Total Profitability of the Print Production Process (Part 1 of 2)

Henrik Christiansen of Graphic Robotics writes about the real meaning of productivity and efficiency in the print production process. This two-part article will address the quantitative side of automation in print.

The First Few Weeks Using New Print Software

When new software is implemented in your native environment – that’s when the real learning happens. Everything prior to that point was theoretical. Take this time to learn how this software uniquely meets the needs of your business.

The Changing Role of Print Sales Representatives

Your sales team must do more than sell. They must be good learners (that means less talking, more listening, and more curiosity about how they can help their customers). Your customer’s time is valuable. When they give you their time they are voting on your value.

Print Software Bootcamp at Dscoop 2018  

Your business toolset is changing; software is becoming one of the most important tools for managing, growing, and innovating your business. At Dscoop next week, we are conducting a Print Software Bootcamp to help Dscoop Members learn more about the Print Software toolset.

Web-to-Print Is for Your Customers

The most precious thing you spend every day is your customer’s time. Treat it with the respect it deserves or it could be the reason you are replaced.

If You Act Like a Printer, You’ll Be Treated Like One

The definition of a successful printer is changing with the times. The updated definition is forcing printers to solve more than a manufacturing challenge. For printers who refuse to move out of their comfort zone; price will be the primary subject of conversation in every sale.

Proactive Customer Service

What is the difference between reactive and proactive customer service? The former waits until the customer has a problem and then makes contact. The latter strives to keep those problems from happening in the first place. Rather than wait for customers to complain, why don’t print software vendors proactively publish helpful best practices to their existing customers on a regular basis?

What’s Holding Your Print Business Back?

This software won’t work for our print business—a conclusion that can be the result of weeks', months', even years’ worth of time and money. Nobody wins in this outcome. Yet, it is an all to common result of failed software implementations.

Self-Service—Your Customer Expectation and Preference

What can your customers do without your parental supervision? Your customer wants to be empowered to interact with your business online. Can they?

How to Choose the Leader of Your Print MIS Transition

A Print MIS transition requires an individual inside your organization to convince all aspects of the business to embrace change. The right leader is a critical decision in making a Print MIS transition less painful.

Standard Operating Procedures, Print Software, and Human Error

A business is a set of processes that are done over and over, do you have those processes written down? Do you review them? How often do make mistakes due to a human error that just involves “I forgot”? Process improvement starts with defining the process, adhering to them, and then constantly learning and adapting the process to the smarter you.

Hiring Technical Staff for Your Print Business

Technical resources are hard to find. Keeping up with technology requires constant learning. When looking for technical staff; probe for the candidates willingness and ability to learn new things - it is an absolute requirement.

The Role of a Product Owner in Print Software

Every industry has different roles, in the software industry there is a role called the “Product Owner” also referred to as the “Product Manager”. First, I’ll explain this unique role in the software industry; then I’ll make a case that as print continues to evolve and become more digitally friendly and software dependent printers are going to have to have this role in their organizations.

Print Business Differentiation

What makes your print business unique? This is a question every print business should ponder over the new year. In 2018 how will you guide your company to create differentiation? Will it be based on the past or the reality of our shared future?

How to Simplify Print MIS Implementations

Print MIS implementations are complex, they touch every corner of your business. It is critical that you actively looks for ways to simplify the project in order to increase your chances of success.

The Customer’s Perspective of Web-to-Print

I’ve been interacting with a lot of customers of web-to-print lately (the people who order from web-to-print, not the printers). In every single interaction I learn something new.

My Evolving Opinions on Project Management

Creating results in your company takes coordinated effort by a group of people – some would call that a “project”. Project management is the art of keeping all the contributors to the project on task “herding the cats.” This skill set and this role is underappreciated in our industry. When you need to get complex things done with a group of people – you need a project manager to drive the project to successful completion.

Print Software Investments Have to Fit into Your Technology Stack

When you buy print software for your business, it needs to “fit” into the technology stack you already have. This means that it solves challenges you cannot solve with your existing software and it will fit with the other pieces of your technology.

Print MIS Product Spotlight: printIQ

The Print MIS/ERP system is the foundation to your overall print business technology stack. It is the system that should run your business. Many Print MIS solutions have and continue to expand their support for a diversified printing operation. One of printIQ’s strengths is its approach to and the execution of a modular approach to supporting additional manufacturing processes

Solution Selling of Print: Find the Challenges Important to the Customer

The solution sale only works if you’re solving the problems that are most important to the customer. The race to find solutions often results in sales teams wasting tremendous effort solving the wrong customer challenges. When you first agree on the challenges and their importance to the customer – solution selling works.

When to Buy a Different Print Software Solution

Purchasing new software is exciting; it’s full of potential, the vendors invest a lot in making the sales process enjoyable. This influences our reaction to when our existing technology gets hard or frustration – it can feel easier to quit and buy a different platform thinking that will solve all our challenges.

Fall in Love with the Problem

We are biased towards solutions when the most valuable thing we can do it clearly define the problem first. The tech startup world calls this innovator bias (falling in love with solutions) – there are always many ways to solve something, the more time you spend understanding the problem, the better chances of getting to the optimal solution.

Boring Execution as a Differentiator

There is no magic innovation button, there is a boring execution button that can differentiate your business. Consistent execution on complex tasks is a path to profitability – checklists are a key tool to help you get there.

The Print Industry Education Gap

There is an educational gap in the print industry, our industry events are still centered around buying and selling equipment rather than preparing printers to compete in the internet age.

When Your Print Business Workflows Create Unnecessary Artifacts

Everyone is talking about workflow automation; this article is about our attachment to artifacts of common print workflows. We have failed to upgrade our thinking beyond the “page” metaphor for sharing information and gaining agreement.

Building Your Business in the Age of Google

Are you interrupting a lot of people to find the few who are in need of your products and services? Or are you working very hard to be found by the customers that are actively seeking out your services?

Is Your Print Business Available Online?

What can your customers do online with your print business? How easy is it for your customers to do business with you? Are you asking your customers to use their precious time because your ordering process is inefficient and not available online?

Sell Workflows That Result in Printed Artifacts

Print is an artifact of a business process/workflow. You should get very curious about the overall workflow so that you can provide more value than just the print. This is the path to embedding your services with a customer and increasing the areas where you can add value.

Ask More Questions, Make Fewer Assumptions, Sell More

People buy workflows; therefore sales is a discovery process that reveals the challenges in their workflows that you might be in a position to solve. You have to ask more question and make fewer assumptions.

How Well Does Your Staff Know Your Software?

We train on presses, we engage with the press vendors. We make sure operators are competent – why don’t we do the same for software solutions (especially Print MIS, production workflow, and web-to-print)?

Print Business Investments: Presses vs. Software

Successful print companies have always been re-investing in their business to remain competitors. Up until now, that investment centered around production equipment and systems. Technology in the form of software will be a primary differentiator moving forward.

Software with Print on the Side

Software is the toolset that enables you to solve the business challenges required to win the print that results from them. Your sales process is going to look like software as the main dish with print as a side dish.

The Intellectual Property Buried in Your Print Business

Every person in your business solves challenges every day with the tools they have at their disposal and the tools they are comfortable deploying. There is a rich set of intellectual property buried there which can be retrieved by listening and understanding how humans looks for ways to build trusted systems.

Avoid Common and Costly Traps of Print Software Evaluation

Evaluating software is not a math problem, please don’t count the number of features and award the deal to the highest score. Print software must solve your challenges, in the order of importance to your business.

Understanding Order Entry from Your Customer’s Perspective

Too many online order entry tools are discounted because the printer fails to see the value from their customer’s perspective. Don’t let your competitors use your customer experience to replace you.

Print Software Evaluation – First Define the Problem It Solves

Every software tool sets out to solve a set of problems, all too often the problem is never defined because the sales process focuses on solutions, benefits, and features. Take the time to understand the problem print software solves and most importantly whether you have that problem!

Product Spotlight: Kodak PRINERGY Cloud

Your print business runs on software, more and more of that software is being delivered via the cloud where resources can be precisely controlled and scaling (both up and down) is configurable in real-time. Kodak’s flagship workflow product – PRINERGY Workflow is no exception to taking advantage of what cloud computing can do to a printer’s production workflow.

Software is our Primary Business Tool

Buy, implement, build – software is part of your everyday business life now. It is the primary tool of all businesses.

Understanding the Software Development Process

Making good software is like building a nice home, it takes multiple resources who are coordinated to deliver on your needs. The more a printer understands the software process, the better they will be at managing it for internal projects or influencing the software roadmap of their vendors.

The Danger of Rushing to a Solution

We want to be efficient, we want to feel smart. When we hear even the first words of a challenge, we categorize it and start trying to solve it based on our available tool set. This prevents you from a real understanding of the problem.

Your Customer’s Lack of Change Management Kills Web-to-Print Adoption

People don’t like change, they need to be led through change because the transition between “how you’ve always done it” and the “new more tech-focused way to do it” can be a river of misery.

Leading Technology Change

Change management is considered a soft skill (maybe because it can’t be measured easily in a spreadsheet). Change management can cause a lot of hard problems with technology change when it ignored.

Strategy vs. Tactics in Print Software Projects

A print software strategy is a definition of where you want to end up – an objective, a goal for how you want all the software components in your business to work together.

Does This Print Software Fit into Your Technology Stack?

There is no “one software package” that runs your entire business. Businesses of all sizes have a technology stack (a collection of software). How well your technology stack fits together (like a beautiful puzzle) greatly determines your success in today’s market.

Clear Communication with Print Software

Clear communication is essential when implementing print software. When you don’t ask clarifying questions, you assume that if there were more relevant details about the integration they would have shared them with you. Do not assume. Ask clarifying questions. Be that annoying person who keeps asking questions.

Excel, PDFs, Paper, and More People (automation-less)

We apply tools from our toolset to solve business challenges, often those tools create silos of data and processes inside our company that prevent us from becoming a truly data-driven organization.

Print Software Execution is the Differentiator

I wish you could just buy the right print software product and it would make you successful. You can’t. Success with software takes your execution. Software doesn’t implement itself, vendors can’t implement it without your active involvement.

Embrace the Stupid

You can call it change management, I prefer the wise words of Seth Godin – change requires you to embrace stupid. Our market requires all of us to keep learning, “the pre-learning state is stupidity.”

What Makes Print Ecommerce Weird?

Selling print online requires knowledge of how to both accept artwork and deliver print assets to the manufacturing facility. Generic ecommerce firms don’t understand this which can cause printers to spend their time and money educating resources about what makes print ecommerce unique.

With Software Changes Maximize Learning, Avoid Fear

Mistakes are part of our lives and our businesses. Nobody likes to make them, how you react to your mistakes dictates what kind of business culture you’ll create. Software changes are an excellent environment to create a learning culture and avoid a fear based culture.

Software Features are Trees - See the Forest

Step back and regroup. Stop looking at features and focus on the overall business objectives of your software solutions. All of us (vendors and printers) need to get out of the feature focus so we can make better software decisions AND make the software we have work better for us in spite of the lacking features.

Assumptions Are the Enemy of Good Software Decisions

When both parties in the print software sales process make assumptions, poor decisions are made. Money is wasted. Time is squandered. Replace assumptions with clarifying questions so you come to a common understanding of the truth.

Preparing Questions for User Conferences – Dscoop 2017

User conferences are an incredible opportunity to load up on learning from the speakers, the vendors, and most importantly your peers. With Dscoop next week, this article covers the importance of the well-formed, thought out questions that can help you get the most out of events by preparing and focusing on your learning goals before you arrive!

Set a Deadline for Print Software Transition

Retiring software solutions can be overwhelming. Continuing to pay maintenance on legacy software solutions is maddening. Start the process of transition by setting a realistic date – draw the line in the sand, rally your troops around what it takes to get from where you are today to throwing a retirement party for your legacy software.

Top 3 Mistakes with Print Software Strategy

Your print software strategy is your responsibility. It requires strategic thinking to both define the challenges and the results you want to create (vision). Don’t make the common mistakes with your print software strategy.

Product Spotlight: KODAK PRINERGY Workflow Software 8

There are two major workflows that a job travels through in your print business. The production workflow which results in a printed product and the business workflow which results in an accurate invoice. The job must travel through both workflows; often in parallel and frequently requires some collaboration and/or communication between the workflows to reach both desired results - high-quality print product(s) delivered on-time and an error free invoice.

Long-Term and Short-Term Print Software Priorities

Your business should be run by your print software systems; your people should run the systems. These print software systems require attention for both short-term initiatives and long-term strategy.

Finding a Niche with Your Print Business

Finding a niche for your print business (a target market with specific pain points) is not about aiming small, it’s about FOCUS and EXECUTION to build a repeatable product offering and to dive deeper into learning about your customer’s problems.

EFI Connect 2017 Educational Sessions with Jennifer Matt

User group meetings create a space for you to find peers for collaboration. Use these meetings to find your people. Do not proceed in these disruptive market conditions on your own! I invite you to attend the sessions. For those of you who are not planning to attend, I want to provide you with some of the key learnings that will be delivered.

Web-to-Print Solution Frustration

When people get frustrated with software, they are looking for an easy answer to get closure. One of the most common reactions to web-to-print frustration is to shop for a different solution. Before you start shopping, take a long hard look at your investment in really learning the web-to-print solution you already have.

3 Success Factors for Print MIS Implementations

Implementing a Print MIS is challenging, it requires a focus on end results without an attachment to “the way things have always been done”, persistence, and adaptability. Look for these personality traits in the people you assign to lead your Print MIS implementation.

You Need Technical Leadership Inside Your Print Business

As software takes on a larger and larger role in your print business, your technical leader plays a greater role in all aspects of your business performance. With the right internal technical leader, software can deliver almost everything that was promised in the demo! Without the right technical leader, you’re going to feel like your software investment was a complete waste of money.

Print MIS Product Spotlight: PrintJobManager

Aleyant PrintJobManager™ is a cloud-based entry into the Print MIS market. Most printers will recognize Aleyant as the maker of the popular Aleyant Pressero™ web-to-print solution. Aleyant is entering the Print MIS market with a stand-alone solution PrintJobManage

Web-to-Print Product Spotlight: Design ‘N’ Buy

Your web-to-print needs to solve two core challenges, the challenge of e-commerce and the unique challenge of selling print online. Design ‘N’ Buy took a different strategy for getting to market with a print-enabled e-commerce solution. They left the e-commerce part to the open-source community by proactively integrating with the most popular open source e-commerce platforms.

Print Software Enables Your Business to Scale

Scaling your print business requires the removal of bottlenecks from order inquiry to accurate invoice payment. Your Print MIS is the system of record that can drive you to a more efficient business and enable you to scale.

Fall in Love with Your Customer’s Problems

The most important thing you can do to thrive during times of disruption is to learn more about your customer’s problems. What you solved for customers in the past might not be relevant in the future, what you can solve in the future will reinvent may reinvent your business.

Top 3 Challenges to the Print Software Sales Process

Mistakes get made during the print software sales process because there is a lack of common understanding, a pressure on the vendor to say yes to every challenge presented, and a tendency to focus on solutions rather than the problems.

Buying and Selling Print Software by the Pound

When you buy and sell software by the pound (# of features), you get distracted as a buyer as to what business challenge is actually most important to solve. As a vendor when you build software by the pound you keep adding without going back and refining the core features of your solution.

The Number 1 Factor in Successful Print MIS Implementations

Implementing Print MIS software is an undertaking that touches every corner of your business. The belief system you go into this process with determines your success more than any other factor.

Pixartprinting: VistaPrint’s Expansion into Upload-and-Print

Inevitably, Cimpress (parent company of VistaPrint) is expanding beyond its roots with the micro business and the business card product. Pixartprinting, a 2014 Cimpress acquisition, targets the creative professional with a 100% upload-and-print model supporting an ever growing collection of product workflows.

Making Great Software is Humbling

Coding is one aspect of software. Making great software takes a team of well-coordinated resources. When we oversimplify software to just a coding event, we get unexpected results

Creating Customer Convenience with Web to Print

Web-to-Print isn’t for the printer; it is a self-service option for your customers so that ordering from you is more convenient. Customer preference is strongly in favor of self-service options for virtually all business processes, print is no exception.

The Role of Live Events in the Print Industry

Going to live industry events is a great opportunity on many levels – get out of working in your business and focus on working on your business. Building relationships with peers and vendors is critical to your future success, live events are where these relationships are cemented.

Maintaining Multiple Web-to-Print Solutions

Printers get frustrated with complex software solutions, this frustration often results in the purchase of additional complex software solutions. Don’t rush to buy your way out of the challenge – it might be more effective to learn your way out of it by doubling down on your commitment to the software you already have.

The Question is the Most Powerful Sales Tool

Customers come to printers to solve communication challenges. Transactional customers get their specific challenges solved. Transaction print is a tough business these days. Printers who inquire about and look to solve bigger picture challenges develop partners with their customers, moving above the transactional level.

Teach Your Daughters to Negotiate

The recent move by the U.S. women’s national soccer team (USWNT), to ask for a raise is leading by example for women of all ages. Their performance from top to bottom has been exemplary, on and off the field, and for them, this would be a performance-based raise. As it turns out, simply “asking” requires the courage to work against how we’ve been socialized to behave as females.

Web-to-Print From the Customer’s Perspective

Web-to-Print software is sold to printing companies. Yet, the primary users of web-to-print solutions are a printing company's customers. This situation is the cause of many issues with the success of web-to-print programs. We have three perspectives at work (only one really matters).

Fall in Love with the Problems - That Software Solves

The biggest mistake in software decisions is relegating the discussion down to the feature level. The feature is a potential solution to an often ill-defined problem which may or may not be relevant to your business.

When Sales Isn’t Involved, Web-to-Print Projects Fail

If sales isn’t involved, your business-to-business (B2B) web-to-print project is going to fail. Web-to-print projects aren’t about features (solutions), they are all about solving the right customer challenges.

The User Experience is the Print Software Product

User experience is the product. 1,000 features does not necessarily equate to a valuable product. When features are embedded into a confusing an cumbersome user experience – they don’t get adopted.

Defining Product Workflows for Web-to-Print

A Product Workflow is a term I use in web-to-print projects; it defines the different offerings you enable online through self-service user interface. Defining terms is critically important to any project, product workflows is one of the key terms to every web-to-print project.

Web-to-Print: Stop Forcing an E-Commerce Workflow

Print is a communication challenge solution. Typically, the printed product is but one part of a much larger challenge. When your sales people learn to take their “print googles” off and uncover the bigger picture challenge, they embed your company deeper into your customer’s business process and ultimately uncover more opportunities for printed products.

Global Graphics Fundamentals Offering Set to Help Production Inkjet Press Manufacturers Increase Functionality and Speed Time to Market

As production inkjet continues to expand its horizons, it can be a challenge for inkjet press manufacturers to have all of the skills internally to take their products to the next level. Global Graphics’ announcement of their Fundamentals service for manufacturers of inkjet presses can help manufacturers overcome some of those hurdles.

My Favorite (Mostly Free) Software Tools

Communication is the primary thing we all do for work. This article outlines some of my favorite tools for communicating, tracking how we use our time, capturing our ideas, organizing projects, and improving remote meetings.

Working In vs. Working On Your Print Business

The temptation is to roll up your sleeves and work in your business. The only job that you can’t delegate to anyone on your staff is working on the business (future plans, strategy, diversification).

Top 5 Priorities for Your Print Business Website

Your print business website should be a living, engaging, and a results delivering part of your business growth plan. For business-to-business printers, this means delivering qualified leads to your sales team.

Growing a Modern Print Business: Sales versus Marketing

Growing your business is more about marketing than it is about hiring more sales people today. The sales cycle is moving online where good marketing programs can nurture prospects from initial inquiry to paying customer.

The Trapped Data of the Print Industry

The print industry’s technology is too closed, too proprietary, making it overly difficult for print businesses (the entities that make this whole ecosystem work) to access, use, distribute, and learn from the data their business’ generate every day. If we keep at this, we will choke off the only thing that matters (growing print businesses).

Web-to-Print Product Spotlight: Infigo

Technology decisions can be costly, not just in licensing/subscription fees but in the time and effort it takes your team to implement, learn, and launch technologies to your customers. One of the aspects of the Infigo product suite is the ability to add modules as you continue to diversify.

Don’t Try and Train Your Customers

Your customers don’t want to be trained, your customers want you to make them look good in front of their boss, get them promoted, and generally make their lives easier. Don’t try and educate your customers, sell them on what’s in it for them if they adjust their behaviors (e.g. use your web-to-print system, submit print-ready PDF files, etc.)

Print Production Workflow Automation

One workflow for all job types results in wasted labor, unrealized profits, and slower turnaround times. The modern print business has to drive automation by creating different routes for different job types. The approach has to be strategic, because automation in one area can create congestion in another.

Making Web-to-Print Part of Your Culture

Web-to-print is a strategic initiative that creates two service level paths through your organization; self-service and full-service. Your leadership is the key ingredient required for success.

Marketing Your Print Business

As we move more business online, utilize digital communication channels, and look to diversify – our print business marketing becomes more critical to our overall business success.

Dscoop Collaboration Station – The Tech Talks

At Dscoop this year, we will be presenting a series of Tech Talks in the Dscoop Collaboration Station on the show floor. We are all on a steep learning curve when it comes to technology. Join us to get a dose of technology education across a wide range of topics. Bring your technology leaders to Dscoop; their importance to your business is growing!

What Are Your Customers Hiring Web-to-Print Systems to Do?

Your web-to-print initiatives should be focused on the “jobs-to-be-done” for your customers. What can the customer “hire” your web-to-print system to do for them? Web-to-print ROI comes from a 100% focus from your customer’s perspective.

Is the Customer Always Right?

Customers ask for a lot, they want us to service them but they also need us to apply our expertise to their challenges. The customer can and should be challenged based on your expertise.

Print MIS Product Spotlight: EFI’s Pace

This product spotlight focuses on three areas that we see as the most powerful and differentiating features of Pace; PaceStation, Pace Customization Modules, and Pace Item Templates. The unifying concept with all three of these features is that they allow a printer to “configure” Pace to work for their unique business requirements.

Build Collaboration into Your Meetings to Innovate

Business meetings can be horribly ineffective, yet with a set of small hacks you can unleash the productivity and innovation your company desperately needs. Here’s the good news, all you need is some Post-It Notes and a phone.

Print Software Success Requires Collaboration at All Levels

As technology continues to change at a rapid rate, collaboration needs to extend into the functional areas of your business. Don’t stop at creating a peer group for print owners, encourage your accounting lead to get into a peer group, each functional area should have multiple sources of knowledge sharing.

Web-to-Print Product Spotlight: Propago Marketing Management Platform

In studying the Propago product, a consistent theme reverberated throughout the product; this product was built based on real-time feedback from live users in a large scale deployment. The approach to solving the business challenges of web-to-print are rooted in data-driven decisions rather than theoretical solutions to ill-defined challenges. Propago came out of a large commercial printing organization that consisted of twenty-five companies across the nation.

Marketing Services, Cross-Media, and YOUR Print Business

It’s time to stop talking about what we should become (marketing services providers) and actually take the steps that move us in that direction. Think through a go-to-market strategy for offering digital products, execute on that plan on your print business’ marketing, enable your sales team, and start diversifying your revenue streams for the digital age.

Data Modeling: A Critical Juncture of Print MIS implementations

In Print MIS implementations, your business data entered into the Print MIS database structure creates the data model of your business. Your attention to detail at this critical juncture of Print MIS implementations can set you up for success.

VistaPrint and the Upload-and-Print Market

Cimpress (parent company of VistaPrint) is expanding into the core of the print market; “upload-and-print”. They are buying demand generators and no doubt investing in user experiences that will enable self-service online purchasing of print for the largest segment of the print industry (manufacturing of the customer’s design/file).

Get Comfortable with Change

Last week I attended Singularity University’s Executive Program in Silicon Valley. The best way to describe what happened to me after a week of hearing some of the brightest people in tech talk about the future is that they dramatically changed my perspective. Come to find out, I had a very narrow lens through which I viewed the world; they replaced it with a wide angle lens that goes beyond our planet and looks far into the future.

Print Business Leadership – Give Yourself a Promotion

Rather than face the reality that all print businesses need to evolve, many print owners default to staying “busy” running the business the way it’s been run for years. Don’t be tempted to “numb yourself” by keeping busy, the market conditions are indisputable, the past performance of your print business is not indicative of future results. We are operating in a different reality with very compelling digital alternatives to print communication.

B2C And Web-to-Print: What It Takes To Build A Successful Online Business

Most printers are business to business (B2B), they do business with other businesses that they have a working relationship with. Business-to-consumer (B2C) is the term used for online businesses that serve anyone who shows up on the website (not necessarily just consumers). As printers consider B2C, they need to understand what it takes to build a successful online business.

Key Questions to Ask When Investing in Print Software Integration

Integration projects span a wide spectrum, from cheap and easy to complex and very expensive. Focus all your attention about print software integration from one place – your business objectives.

Top 5 Mistakes in Choosing a Print MIS Solution

Your Print MIS or Print ERP is the most important print software in your business. The process for purchasing a Print MIS is dysfunctional; avoid these five common mistakes in your Print MIS sales process.

Why Web-to-Print Matters More Now Than Ever

Web-to-print is a critical piece of your online presence. The ability for your customers to easily transact with you online is no longer a differentiator, it’s an expectation.

The Transition from Physical to Digital Communication

This pace of change is outrunning your print business’ technology decisions. A web-to-print platform decision you made two years ago could be completely out of date with the mobile-first world we live in today. Your aging ERP/Print MIS system has no way of understanding a product that exits your building via an Ethernet cable rather than a shipping truck.

A Strategic Approach to Print Workflow Automation

All printers should be thinking about “workflow automation” as a strategic initiative; produce more with less labor, less waste, in less time as a way to remain competitive. Time savings should be strategically invested in diversification, new skills acquisition, and cross-training.

Successfully Building Storefronts…And Managing The Scope Creep

One of the most common calls we get is from people frustrated about trying to build storefronts for their customers. The questions we get are often along these lines: “I’ve had this software for 6 months and we have only launched one store. Why is it taking so long?”; “Are my people qualified to build these storefronts?”; “I have no idea where to start, where should we start?”

Is Your Print Business Sales Focused or Production Focused?

A sales focus is external. A production focus is internal. A sales focused print business leader is constantly asking the question, “How does this activity/investment improve my customer’s experience or business?” A sales focused print leader escorts the external rate of change into the business at a rate that often makes their employees uncomfortable.

Top 5 Web-to-Print Sales Demonstration Tips

A web-to-print demo is your chance to demonstrate how your print software technology solves the relevant challenges of a specific customer. The key words are “relevant challenges” and “specific customer”. Do your homework so your demonstration addresses what the customer actually cares about.

The Top Print Software Question: When Will This Be Done?

Print software is eating your budget because software is becoming the tool of choice for industry leaders to create differentiation in the marketplace.

Transitioning Web-to-Print Solutions

Maintaining and paying for multiple web-to-print solutions is more expensive than you think. Transitioning off legacy systems has positive repercussions for your technical resources and your customers.

What to Measure (KPIs, metrics) in Your Print MIS

The richness of the data your Print MIS can give you can be the stuff you dream about when you wait for your next untimely delivery of manually-produced Excel spreadsheets.

Motivating Your Team to Use the Print MIS

The data that you rely on from the Print MIS will only be useful and reliable if it is complete and accurate. So, how do you encourage your team to participate completely and consistently in the Print MIS?

Adobe Takes Digital Publishing to New Levels

Adobe is taking mobile app creation to a brand-new level with the launch of Adobe Digital Publishing Solution 2015. Senior Editor Cary Sherburne spoke with Adobe’s Bridget Roman and Colin Fleming to learn more.

The Fear of Launching Print Software

Launching any new print software technology can feel risky. With the rate of change in both our businesses and software technology, we have to create a culture that is comfortable with launching early and iterating through issues. It is impossible to predict every possible scenario; it is liberating to accept that finding issues post-launch is part of the plan.

Print Software as an Infrastructure Investment

Print software is an infrastructure investment in our increasing online and digital economy. Adopting a strategic infrastructure approach to investing in and implementing print software will be a key differentiator for print businesses moving forward.

Interview with EFI's Udi Arieli on FedEx Office's Use of EFI Workflow and Productivity Technology

Yesterday, EFI and FedEx Office announced that FedEx Office is using EFI products for a more cost-effective and streamlined delivery of professional print services. I spoke to Udi Arieli, EFI’s Director, High End Market Business Development, EFI Productivity Software, to get the scoop for this WhatTheyThink exclusive.

Technical Staffing for Printers – Top 3 Characteristics

Staffing your technology is as important as staffing your presses. The top characteristics for good technical resources: understand the limits of your knowledge, resist making assumptions, and see opportunities rather than roadblocks.

Selling Print to an Informed and Predominately Online Buyer

As the online world continues to expand, your prospects and customers can become more educated buyers. Your response to this is to invest in your online presence so that first impressions count.

Printers 5 Top Challenges with Print Software

Software is mission critical to your business, like other infrastructure investments it takes time and effort to make the best decisions, plan to get the most ROI, and continue to build differentiation in the marketplace. Optimizing your print software investments comes with challenges which every printer faces in order to compete in an increasingly online, digital world.

Web-to-Print Differences: In-Plants vs. Commercial Printers

InfoTrends’ research has uncovered some key differences in web-to-print adoption among commercial printers versus corporate in-plants. This article leverages recent research to explore some of the differences in how these two groups use web-to-print technology.

Online Print Marketing: Optimizing for Two Audiences

Inbound marketing is the strategy of choice for online marketing, content is the main ingredient to any successful inbound marketing strategy. Your content has to be optimized for two audiences; your target customers and the search engines.

Top 5 Mistakes with Web-to-Print

Web-to-print is our term for moving customer engagement online. This represents a big change for most traditional business-to-business printers. This article describes the top five mistakes I see when working with printers through this transition from an offline business to an online / self-service customer interaction model.

The Custom Print Software Project

When you need a custom software solution, think about assembling a puzzle rather than building from scratch. The software landscape is full of integrate-able pieces that can give you ‘expected’ functionality so you can focus your custom development on what makes you ‘unique’.

Has your Print MIS Estimating Fallen Apart?

Estimating is a core function for Print MIS software, yet many printers fail to implement this part of the system to a trusted level, hence there is a lot of retreating back to Excel. Estimating is a critical function that needs to be part of your integrated and measureable print management information system.

Focus, Priorities: The Future of Your Print Business

Looking backwards won’t help you navigate the uncharted waters of the future. The print businesses of the future will adapt to remain relevant in a digital, online, and data-driven world.

Organic Search Success and Duplicate Content

The internet search engines do not like duplicate content; in fact they rank your site lower if you are duplicating content from a site that clearly has the authority to that content.

Make Your Customers the Stars of Your Marketing

Your marketing should talk more about your customers than about you. Compelling marketing content is about telling customer success stories to teach and attract more customers who find your content relevant to their current challenges.

Workflow— Reinventing PRINERGY 7 and Kodak

This article is a part of a series of articles by David L. Zwang that focuses on the processes and products that can lead to the transformation of your current workflows and business to prepare you for the new challenges ahead. In this article, Zwang looks at the release of PRINERGY 7, in the context of Kodak’s reinvention.

New Workflow Chief at Kodak

We recently learned that Kodak has hired a new workflow chief. Allan Brown, formerly with HP and Xerox, joined the company as General Manager of its Unified Workflow Solutions business. Read what Brown has to say about workflow and Kodak strategies moving forward.

Launching Additional Brands Online

What’s more costly, opening up a new successful retail location or a new successful online brand/store? The answer is “it depends”. Just because making a new e-commerce site is “cheap” doesn’t take into consideration all the costs of driving traffic and getting conversions.

Is Your Print MIS Your Trusted System of Record?

Whether you have recently acquired a new Print MIS system or you’ve been using the same one for a decade, we recommend you assess it as the “trusted system of record” for your print business. This assessment is critical in our increasingly data-driven world.

Print MIS and Data are NOT Boring

Nobody uses terms like exciting, sexy, or compelling when they talk about their Print MIS solution. Your Print MIS isn’t supposed to be sexy; its job is to serve up the story of your business in the form of data collected in a trusted system of record.

Print Estimating & Quoting System Product Spotlight: arifiQ

Self-service is a growing preference among customers, pricing transparency is a feature of our online world, and speed is a growing differentiator in all aspects of our business. arifiQ has focused on a pivotal function of print – estimating/quoting; enabling printers to adapt to the new realities of our increasingly digital, online, and fast-paced business environment.

Print’s Representation at the MarTech Conference

MarTech – the Marketing Technology Conference took place March 31, 2015 in San Francisco. I attended to see how print is being represented within the modern marketing mix.

Online Marketing for Printers

You haven’t updated your website in over two years. You don’t remember if you have a LinkedIn page, you thought someone once tweeted something, and you recently had a customer complain about not being able to find you online.

Adobe Tackles Next-Generation Digital Publishing with Summer Launch of Adobe Publish

We’ve written a fair amount about digital publishing in this space since we believe it presents a good opportunity for new revenue streams for printing firms – not only for traditional publishing applications but increasingly for sales enablement and other enterprise dissemination of information. Adobe is about to take this to the next level with its summer launch of Adobe Publish.

Data-Driven: Thriving Print Business in 2020

A data-driven print business starts with a trusted system of record and then as selected meaningful metrics that influence your business decisions and your staff’s daily behavior.

Online Engagement: Thriving Print Business in 2020

The online channel is in the language of the customer and you have to compete to be found. These fundamental characteristics of this channel should drive your online presence at every level.

Thriving Print Business in 2020: Diversified, Online, and Data-Driven

Expand your thinking in many directions, beyond the four walls of your manufacturing operations, beyond your business into your customer’s business, and beyond print to the other communication methods that are complimentary to print.

The Role of Marketing in Your Print Business

Marketing is about delivering qualified leads to your sales team. The online world has converted marketing into a role that can be precisely measured. Start thinking of marketing as a role with a quote (# of qualified leads delivered), stop thinking of marketing as your brand colors or business card design.

As a Print Owner, Where is Your Focus?

If your focus is all internal, you are missing the broader context of how your products and services are utilized within your customer’s business. Loyal customers are created when you help them achieve their business results, that means engaging with customers in the broader context of their business.

Now What Are You Trying to Sell Me?

The first impressions of your business will be online. How does your online presence compare to you offline presence? Can prospects understand your business and what you can do for them from your website, your blog, and your social media channels? Your online presence sets up your sales team for success.

Is Your Print MIS Testing Your Patience?

In today’s world of instant gratification, it is really hard to be patient. Rather than walking down the hall to talk to your colleague, you can email them from 20 feet away and then march down the hall 15 minutes later to say “didn’t you get my email?”. In the information age, most of us have forgotten what it’s like to not be instantly connected whether we are on vacation, in a restaurant and now even on planes. It has largely destroyed our ability to be patient.

Parenting and Your Print MIS

Parenting and your print MIS have many characteristics in common. They are both long-term investments that essentially never end. There is great potential combined with great frustration and common stages that you will pass through before feeling any sense of accomplishment – always in retrospect.

Radical vs. Incremental Change with Web-to-Print and Print MIS

Do you approach change as an incremental, keep everyone comfortable manner? Or do you see how much the external conditions have changed while your company has stayed still? Is your print software able to support your current and future business needs?

Own Your Print Software: Web-to-Print and Print MIS

Let’s get one thing perfectly clear, you DO NOT invest in print software to run your business as it is today. The whole point of software is to enable you to run your business differently - creating more efficiency.

Web-to-Print Product Spotlight: MarcomCentral

Twenty years ago when we described the function of marketing we would have started with terms like “creative” and “messaging.” Then we would have talked about distribution channels for getting these creative assets and messages out to the target audiences, primarily consisting of print, TV, and radio.

From the Yellow Pages to Google

When local businesses moved from “getting found” via the yellow pages to internet search so much changed.

The Role of the Project Manager in Print Software

Every business owner has ideas, plans, and a vision for what they want their company to become. There is never a shortage of ideas; there is a severe lack of execution. Good project management can convert more of your ideas to reality through a disciplined execution process that annoys most people involved (especially impatient, attention deficit prone business owners).

Table Service at McDonald’s

The dining experience at fast food restaurants isn’t about the dining experience at all. It’s about the price, the availability, and the consistency no matter where you are in the world. The value proposition is clear, you serve yourself, you’re encouraged to clean up after yourself, and clearly by the comfort of the seats, you aren’t encouraged to linger.

Focus on Solutions in Print Software

Frustration happens, especially with print software projects like Print MIS and web-to-print. When frustration happens do you flex, adjust, look for a solution or do you stay in that frustrated state? Find evidence of the behavior you want more of and reward that behavior, in your people, in your vendors, in your partners – that will accomplish more than yelling, escalating, and threatening will ever do.

Industry Events, Peer Recommendations, and Print Software Decisions

EFI Connect, Dscoop X, AMPS Executive Leadership, NPOA, and PODI, the upcoming industry events where you have an excellent opportunity to connect and collaborate with peers. Do you want to do everything in your power to assure your next print software decision is a good one? Get the whole story from a peer who has already implemented the solution.

The False Security of the Print Software RFP

The checklist RFP (Request For Proposal) fails to deliver the best purchasing decision. Your peers (the voice of current customers) are your most trusted source of information about how print software products perform in live environments and how print software companies support their customers after the sales process.

Print MIS Product Spotlight: PrintVis

The PrintVis MIS solution has a phenomenal product span, meaning the ability to “flex” in both directions, respond to growth and decline. In this Product Spotlight, Jen Matt reviews the PrintVis MIS solution.

We Have Always Done it This Way

Change is viewed as risky because we want to believe that past success guarantees our future success. Your customers are changing, technology is changing, and your competitors are changing, why would you think that maintaining the status quo is anything but the riskiest thing you can do? Standing still is the only way to assure your business’ decline

Semiconductor Manufacturer Maxim Integrated Finds Sales Power in Adobe Digital Publishing Suite

As our readers will know, we have been following developments with Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, both in terms of how it is helping publishers tackle the “dollars to digital dimes” conundrum of digital publishing as well as some interesting views into how enterprises are adopting DPS for sales enablement. Today’s story takes us to Maxim Integrated, a designer and manufacturer of semiconductors, who has benefited from the integration of DPS with Adobe Experience Manager for increased sales power.

Print MIS Product Spotlight: PressWise

The online channel is vital to the future of your print business. The online channel includes all the ways you engage with your customers online. Every new channel you open up with a customer increases the overall loyalty of that customer, creates barriers to entry for your competitors, and has the potential to decrease the customer burden of doing business with you by offering self-service access to your business.

Is Upgrading Worth the Risk?

Making the decision to upgrade a Print MIS or web-to-print system can cause anxiety about the unknown issues that may result. A well-planned out implementation can minimize risk and disruption to both the printer and their customers.

Embrace Print Software as Complimentary to Your People

Your people have the power to resist print software technology changes by focusing on the challenges instead of finding solutions. Your job as a leader is to portray technology as a complimentary tool for your people to work more effectively.

Collaborative Commerce: The Necessary Evolution of Web-to-Print

Web-to-print technology and the customer facing resources working in print today need to evolve together so we can support online “collaborative commerce”: a procurement process that requires collaboration between the buyer and the seller.

Plan for a Culture of Continuous Process Improvement in 2015

One of the biggest challenges with print software technology today is achieving its full potential. We often get lost in the running of our day-to-day business which prevents us from ongoing process improvement. After the initial implementation, we get distracted and back to the reality of getting customer jobs out the door. We fall into the bad habit of reactive improvement, or if you prefer a more technical term, “Band-Aids”.

Print MIS Product Spotlight: CoreBridge

CoreBridge is a cloud based, multi-tenant software solution whose business model is subscription based. Like pure technology startups, CoreBridge’s pricing model is easy to understand, available on their website, and allows you to start small and grow with CoreBridge through volume and/or functionality.

Teaching and Telling Stories Online

First impressions of your business matter, especially to new prospects. More and more first impressions are online. How does your online presence compare to your offline one?

Marketing Equals Lead Generation – Give them a Quota

Unless you are a large public company who needs to “protect their brand” and produce appropriate messaging for Wall Street (otherwise known as corporate marketing), the primary role of marketing in your organization should be lead generation.

Print Software: Dreaming vs. Executing

The raw potential of what technology can do for our business is unlimited, like a book a matches there is great possibility. Execution is about determining which match (project, goal, objective) you are going to put your energy into to ignite and then sustain your focus to create real change. Dreaming helps you think big, executing forces you to act within the constraints of your environment (resources, market, customers, and budget).

Fostering a Great Relationship between Your Web-to-Print and Print MIS Systems

Having an integrated web-to-print and print MIS system isn’t just about being able to technically connect the systems. To get the most out of this integration you want to enable communication between systems that makes the two systems truly seem like one in terms of information exchanged

Define the Problem First

I am involved in a lot of conversations where companies and people are trying to solve a business challenge with software. Communication is so compressed nowadays, people’s time is limited, and we are almost always communicating across multiple time zones and frequently across cultures. This makes a common understanding difficult and opens up lots of opportunity for confusion.

Getting Found: Yellow Pages to Online Search

Online search has replaced the Yellow Pages as the primary way local businesses get found. This change requires a very different approach by businesses and a steep learning curve. The online world requires you to compete to be “found” for a lion share of the search traffic. The competition is constantly changing, therefore local businesses need to make a sustained investment.

What Does “Change” Mean to You?

Change evokes fear in some, excitement in others, and dread in many. What we can all agree on, change is picking up the pace.

Every Print Job Doesn’t Deserve an Estimate

Efficiency requires the segmentation of your workflow into at least three different workflows: self-service, light-service, and full-service. Each workflow applies the appropriate amount of labor and technology to deliver on the promise to the customer in the most efficient manner possible.

You Bought Something New, Now What?

Purchasing new technology is always done with the best of intentions and the desire to implement to a fully utilized state. Often the day-to-day business takes over and erodes the focus of a new technology project. Getting a game-plan together to ensure success and cement the purchase as a worthwhile one is critical.

The Evolution of Graph Expo

Graph Expo 2014 was a memorable one. The fire at O’Hare on Friday September 26th had many vendors and attendees scrambling to find their way to Chicago. There were countless stories of planes, trains and automobiles with many people having to find last minute modes of transportation to make it to McCormick. At the very least, people suffered through long delays waiting for planes to take their turn getting air space around Chicago. However, the logistical challenges weren’t the only thing that made Graph Expo 2014 memorable. The footprint of the show was noticeably smaller than in previous years.

Print Software Project or Emotional Roller Coaster?

Change is difficult for most people; everyone travels at their own pace through a process that starts with resistance and for most finishes in acceptance. You can improve your chances of success by communicating a lot in the beginning, providing emotional support in the middle and then becoming more of a coach once people are starting to accept there is really only one option – adapt or leave.

Print Software at Graph Expo

Web-to-Print and Print MIS vendors have always been represented at Graph Expo mostly hidden amongst the presses, wide format devices, and finishing gear. The trend we are seeing is less heavy equipment at the show, hence more room for software solutions to get the air time they deserve.

Web-to-Print Product Spotlight: PageDNA

This product spotlight focuses on three areas of the PageDNA offering: the store building wizard and project management approach to configuring new storefronts, their open approach to integrations, and the flexibility of their services model.

Combat Noise with Dedicated Project Focus

Focus is a challenge in our always connected and therefore always interrupted lives. Print software projects like web-to-print and Print MIS require long-term dedicated focus to ensure success. Project success is about getting live sooner and incrementally determining the next most important improvement to the implementation (forever).

Building Yourself a Support System

When installing and using print technology, you have a lot of resources to rely on: the vendor, your internal team, the internet, user manuals, consultants and so on. However, often the most untapped resource pool is the user community to which you belong.

Digital Darwinism - Adapting to the new realities of our digital world

Adapting to the new realities of our digital world is a challenge for all industries. Digital Darwinism impacts all of us because the rate of change in technology and society is outpacing our organizations. Change is inevitable; the pace of change has to accelerate if you’re going to be on the survivor side of Digital Darwinism.

Print MIS Product Spotlight: EPMS

This product spotlight focuses on three areas of the EPMS Print MIS offering: the continuous expansion of Print MIS direct users, the support for an industry that is aggressively diversifying, and the ability to make EPMS work uniquely for your business through customization and integration.

3 Top Reasons Web-to-Print Projects Fail

The three top reasons web-to-print projects fail; the lack of business leadership, the sales team fails to sell the solution, and the customer fails to adopt the solution.

The Scope Creep Virus

The fantasy goes like this when implementing software or managing a software project: "this project will be completed on time and under budget". The reality of many is that "the project is late, we didn't deliver on what we said we would, and we went over budget".

Print Software is a Tool (like a Hammer)

We confuse tools for solutions. Print software is a required tool that is part of an overall investment in making your business more productive, profitable, and competitive. The business results come from your vision, your plan, and the deployment of your labor who utilize the tool to deliver the business results you desire.

More Print Industry Shelfware: CRM Systems

Lots of Print MIS systems have added CRM modules to their offering. This makes sense, the Print MIS should be your system of record for all the interactions you have with current customers, adding a layer on top of your Print MIS would give you access to all the business the customer transacts with you.

The Print MIS Job Costing Challenge and Opportunity

Undoubtedly one of the hardest and most stressful parts of configuring and then running your Print MIS is the job costing component. Being in a position to use your Print MIS to accurately compare estimate to actual costs is often given up on in frustration due to the complexity of the setup and configuration. However, when it is done, and done properly it is the ultimate definition of a successful Print MIS system.

3 Critical Factors for Web-to-Print Sales & Marketing Success

Would you put your Sales department in charge of your next IT project? Heck no! So why do you put your IT department in charge of your web-to-print projects?

Technology Money Pit or Worthwhile Investment?

If you have ever purchased a heritage home with the vision of renovating it to become a beautifully restored family home for a reasonable budget that you have carefully considered and thought out, you know how foolish that budget may feel once you have actually completed those renovations and uncover all of the hidden heritage wonder. I call our 1908 house the lovely money pit – it’s lovely but it sure proved to be a money pit.

Why Printers are Vulnerable to Brokers, Distributors, and Print Management Companies

Customers expect more from their vendor partners than simply delivering the product on time and at a fair price. As the print industry continues to contract, differentiation is required to remain competitive. Printers are at risk from print-manufacturing independent service providers because customers are looking to reduce the number of vendors and engage with vendor partners who make doing business with them very easy.

Make Data-Driven Business Decisions with Your Print MIS

Your business generates a lot of data; your Print MIS should be the system of record for that data. The data should drive your business decisions based on meaningful metrics/key performance indicators (KPIs). Making data a part of your culture will make you a better leader and help your staff understand how their daily actions impact the business.

Order-Entry Data Collection

Self-Service vs. Full-Service

Customer preference is trending towards self-service, yet most printers continue to offer only one way to do business with them – a full-service order entry process that involves multiple back and forth communications between customer and printer via e-mail/FTP.

The Keys to Mobile Support in Print Software

In one of our recent active discussions on the new Print Software section, a WhatTheyThink reader asked “in your support for mobile do you recommend looking for just the sites being "responsive" or applications to be "native" or just plain "compatible", i.e. no Flash?” After my third paragraph response to this question I decided this warranted a full length feature article to describe and comment on the varying degrees of mobile support in web software.

Making Time for an Annual Print MIS Checkup

It is so easy in your very busy world to not sit back and take a look in the rearview mirror at how things are going in terms of processes, applications and projects underway in your company. One area where this effort can pay off tremendously is in terms of your Print MIS system. Making a conscious effort to do an annual Print MIS checkup can help keep your system fresh, moving forward and also tune-up any areas that may not be performing as they should.

Choosing a Web-to-Print Partner

Print technology of all kinds; presses, production software, Print MIS software, and web-to-print technologies have one thing in common – they are constantly changing. This one factor probably causes the most pain in the purchasing process. As a buyer you want to feel confident with your purchasing decision, yet the very thing you’re investing in is in a constant state of change.

How to Survive the Print MIS Transition

A Print MIS transition is like a battlefield of sorts. For the person leading the transition it is a time of scrutiny, chaos, incredible intensity and unexpected disruptions. It is, without a doubt, one of the most complex and stress generating events you can face. While it is incredibly rewarding to get through it, you usually don’t come out of it unscathed.

What Can You Do to Save Your Customers Money?

A printer e-mailed me recently and said, “the Vice President of Procurement at our biggest customer is open to a meeting but she wants to know what I can do to save her money.” Of course she does, she’s always wanted her vendors to engage with her in a way that solves her business challenges and makes her look good.

The Print MIS Go-Live Date Dilemma

One of the biggest challenges printers face when transitioning to a new Print MIS system is to pick a go-live date. Picking this magical date is a bit like gambling – you really don’t know for sure when the cards are going to line up the way you need them to.

Building Digital Connections with Your Customers

Your sales team creates customer demand for your products and services, your production team fulfills that demand by manufacturing quality printed products on-time. Both your sales team and your production team need to be SOLD on the strategic, long-term importance of creating digital connections to your existing customers and using digital connections to win new customers.

Selling Solutions: A Path for Your Print Sales Team

Customers have challenges; the best way to increase your sales is to provide your products and services wrapped into solutions to your customer’s challenges. Solution selling is an easier topic to write about then it is to execute on. Too many people write about the idea without providing guidance on how to get from where you are today (selling print jobs) to selling print programs or solutions.

Experts at the Past vs. a Vision for the Future

Last week I was in Bali, Indonesia, speaking at Dscoop Asia. The event, the travel, and the reading I did along the way came together with a common theme which can best be summed up by a quote from the book I read on the way home.

Print MIS Implementation: Don’t Forget Your People!

A Print MIS implementation/transition is a massive undertaking. It is usually driven by an extensive technology-focused project plan and/or strategic document. These projects can take anywhere from 6-18 months to implement. So much thought and effort gets put in to so many elements.

Say Thank You: Customer-Vendor Relationships

When you are the customer, you’re always right – correct? Maybe not always but the relationship between customer and vendor is a tricky one.

Web-to-Print: Are Users Ordering or Shopping?

A web-to-print site is all about customer convenience, enabling your customers to order from you in a self-service fashion. One thing to understand about your customers is whether they are ordering or shopping.

Transforming and Automating Workflows: Thinking out of the box Part 2

There is an assumption that as service provider there are very specific, almost predetermined ways that a workflow to support your business operations should be developed and deployed. However, sometimes, to use a somewhat overused term, you need to think out of the box. In Part 2 of this article we continue to look at some other ways to approach offerings, and workflows.

Test Your Assumptions via Minimum Viable Product

We think we know our customers, we think we know our market; we think we can predict the future, we can’t and we shouldn’t invest lots of money without building in the ability to test our assumptions with data rather than opinions and theories.

The Feature Trap of Buying Print Software

There is a hidden pitfall most of us in the position of purchasing print software are very susceptible to. We are all human, and while we have the best of intentions to do thorough evaluations while making a new print software purchase, we quickly fall victim to the ‘feature trap.’

Transitioning Your Print MIS System

If you are currently functioning on a legacy Print MIS system, you know better than anyone that you are going to have to make a move ‘soon.’ Maybe soon is in the next 2 months or the next 2 years, but you know that your system isn’t going to lead you into the future.

Web-to-Print: A Mission Critical Sales and Marketing Project

Web-to-Print is a sales and marketing project that happens to involve technology, yet most printers delegate the leadership of web-to-print projects to their technical resources. We are collectively as an industry putting too much emphasis on the technology and not enough emphasis on the sales and marketing aspects.

Your Marriage to Your Print MIS May Be in Trouble!

There are several marriage mistakes that lead to divorce: cheating, dishonesty, addictions, and major changes in priorities. What does this have to do with your print management information system (Print MIS)? I am suggesting that your Print MIS is your most important business partner.

How Sales Creates Web-to-Print Disasters

The sales process sets up the critical transition period from lead to customer. Customers remember what was said in the sales process and they often use this to guide their approach to implementation. Don’t inadvertently focus your soon to be customers in the wrong direction.

Don't Prioritize Activity Over Strategy

Activity does not equal results. You can be really busy, work really hard and fail miserable because you were busy doing the wrong thing.

Transforming and Automating Workflows: Do I need to do it all at once?

In preparation for this article, David spoke with a wide format print service provider with a portfolio of disparate equipment that implemented the first phase of a production workflow system to automate and optimize some of his processes. The results were quite impressive.

Transforming and Automating Workflows: Can I really have it all?

David speaks with a print service provider with a variety of disparate equipment that implemented a business and production workflow system to handle it all, and his only complaint is that he wishes he had done it sooner.

Transforming and Automating Workflows: Getting work into the plant Part Two - Have We Arrived or is it Just a Rest Stop?

In Part two of this two part article, David looks at some of the current solution offerings that are designed to bring your client’s jobs into your plant to see if and how they are meeting the challenges of today’s service provider.

Transforming and Automating Workflows: Getting work into the plant Part One: A Trip Down Memory Lane

In Part one of this two part article, David looks at Some history of, and some of the solution types for getting work into your plant.

Use Technology to Change Behavior

Technology promises great potential to create leverage in our business. Leverage isn’t created in the purchase of technology; real leverage comes from how the use of the technology changes the behavior of the people who use it.

Transforming and Automating Workflows: Web to Print or getting work into the plant

David looks at how you get the work from your customer into your plant. What does web to print mean to you; and is it the answer to getting work into your plant, or are there multiple answers?

Print MIS System Transition: A Challenge and a Great Opportunity

Transitioning your Print MIS system is a mission-critical project and also a great opportunity to re-think your business operations and optimize the functionality of the new system.

Transforming and Automating Workflows: Marketing Campaign Automation

David looks at Marketing Campaign process automation. This is a new and interesting area that can help support a Print Service Provider transformation into a Marketing Services Provider business model, and potentially integrate into an automated print production workflow.

How Would You Sell Against Yourself in Your Largest Client?

When I interview print sales representatives and ask them why their customers do business with them, they almost always say because we have a great relationship, our service is great, and our people are great. Relationship selling is a very common way to sell.

Transforming and Automating Workflows: Workflow Dominates Print13 Part Two

In part two of this article, David looks at new and updated MIS/ERP business management systems that were introduced at Print13 in Chicago.

Transforming and Automating Workflows: Workflow Dominates Print13 (Part One)

In this article, David looks at many new production workflows solutions that were introduced at Print13 in Chicago. Due to the sheer volume of new announcements, this is Part One of two articles covering this new product review.

Transforming and Automating Workflows: Cloud Based Workflow Management Systems

In this article, David looks at cloud-based production management systems, a relatively new concept and product category, what they look like and how they compare to the more conventional workflow management offerings.

Make Great Software Decisions

We collectively make a lot of poor software decisions, according to my very bias and unscientific research we make way more mistakes in this area than we do with other business decisions. What is it about technology that causes a collective brain freeze when it comes to making good decisions?

HP Pulls Plug on HP Hiflex Management Information System and HP Hiflex Web-to-Print Solutions

A couple weeks ago, a source informed Senior Editor Cary Sherburne that HP was in the process of pulling the plug on its Hiflex MIS and web-to-print offerings. While there has been no official public announcement from HP, this article summarizes what customers are being told and includes an official statement from HP.

Transforming and Automating Workflows: Solutions for disparate systems?

In this article, David looks at how the existing solution offerings can be used in disparate workflow systems both inside the plant and bridging client workflow systems

Transforming and Automating Workflows: Packaged Workflow Solutions

David looks at some of the packaged workflow systems that are now being offered, either with hardware products or as standalone solutions. He will look at them as primary support for a device as well as how they work in the context of a broader plant workflow.

Transforming and Automating Workflows: Workflow Systems, déjà vu all over again

This series of articles by David L. Zwang focuses on the processes and products that can lead to the transformation of your current workflows and business, to prepare you for the new challenges ahead. In this article, David moves the discussion forward, now focusing on ‘workflow systems,’ what that encompasses, and some of the things you need to pay attention to as you review them. All of this done with an eye toward building a flexible platform upon which to grow.

Technology’s ROI Requires People

Technology alone does not create value, differentiation, or competitive advantage. It has to be combined with strategy and execution (by your people) – that’s where real differentiation happens.

Transforming and Automating Workflows: Production Infrastructures –DFEs: The State of the Market

In this article, David continues the infrastructure discussion, now focusing on the current state of the DFE (Digital Front End, aka RIPs) in the market, covering Digital Print DFEs as well as CTP DFEs, and the beginning of the plant production workflow. All of this done with an eye toward building a flexible platform upon which to grow.

Transforming and Automating Workflows: Production Infrastructures – The evolution of the DFE

David continues the discussion, now focusing on the production infrastructure by looking at the role of the DFE (Digital Front End, aka RIP), and how that has changed as a result of digital press technology and the changing demands of the marketplace. In keeping with the series theme, he looks at it with an eye toward building a flexible platform upon which to grow.

What Job Does Web-to-Print Do for Your Customers?

Web-to-print is a product that should do a “job” for you and/or your customers. When you look at technology purchases through the lens of “jobs” you focus on what’s really important.

Transforming and Automating Workflows: It starts with a good business infrastructure Part 2

In this article, David continues the discussion of the business infrastructure by looking at some of the packaged MIS and ERP systems, and how they are structured, with an eye toward building a flexible platform with which to grow.

Buying Print Software: A How To Guide

Too many mistakes (big ones) are being made in our industry around software purchases at a time when nobody can afford expensive mistakes. Virtually all of these mistakes are preventable.

Web-to-Print Isn’t an Option Anymore… It’s a Necessity!

Industry pundits have long been discussing the value of Web-to-Print. Firms that have developed easy-to-use Web-based services are successful because customers of all sizes are seeking convenience. This article uses data from a recent InfoTrends study to show how Web-to-print has become an essential ingredient when serving the enterprise market.

Transforming and Automating Workflows: It starts with a good infrastructure Part 1

This new series by David L. Zwang focuses on the processes and products that can lead to the transformation of your current workflows and business, to prepare you for the new challenges ahead. This series runs once a month over the course of the year, with the first article appearing in January 2013. Zwang looks at process transformation and automation, and the steps you need to take to be successful. He will also look at some of the current product offerings and how they are being, or could be, used to help you transform your business and strengthen your customer relationships.

Web Strategy vs. Web Technology

There is no shortage of talk about web-to-print technologies; there is too little talk about printer’s online strategies. Printers can talk for hours about how this or that web technology has failed them or this or that technology is what made all the difference.

Transforming and Automating Workflows: Preparation is Paramount

In this article, David lays out the key steps necessary to prepare for a successful transformation. While it is important to look toward the final destination goal, without a map delineating the best path to achieve that goal, there are many more pitfalls along the way and unseen problems in the future.

Transforming and Automating Workflows: A Critical Success Factor

This new series by David L. Zwang focuses on the processes and products that can lead to the transformation of your current workflows and business to prepare you for the new challenges ahead. With this introductory article, David lays out the business drivers and some of the series topics. As the print industry and the marketplace as a whole continue their digital evolution, business process transformation becomes an increasingly critical success factor.