Don’t overlook the power of pre-press software for in-plants handling complex print jobs.
In all too many venues inhabited by digital print systems, the mantra of the day is “get the job out the door.” Some jobs are easy-peasy, while others are black holes of stress and sinks of time from which there is no hope of efficiency, much less profitability. Then, you get to do it all over again tomorrow. Are you having fun yet?
A variety of workflow and automation options seek to address this challenge, with every print engine vendor offering its own respective solution. Many of these are perfectly reasonable offerings””as long as they are used on the device that came with the software. But there are two problems with this line of thought. First, many of these products have been in the market, largely unchanged, for as long as twenty years. They look, feel, and act old. Second, most small print shops, in-plants, municipal operations, or school systems rely on several makes and models of equipment, which means they lack software consistency across their print engines. In most places, the newest, highest performance box is not far from the front door, with three or four other makes and models of equipment scattered around as space allows. Sure, the machines all take files like PDFs that are supposedly device-neutral, but the servers built into most small or mid-size printers often require customized care and feeding if they are to quickly and reliably produce finished documents that are even approximately acceptable.
To be fair, most standard MS Word or PDF files will print correctly on almost any device. Those are the easy ones. But suppose it’s 87 pages consisting of MS Word and PowerPoint files, PDFs, half a dozen color photos, some scans, and screen shots””all of which need to be produced on three colors of paper and assembled for spiral binding. Then, adding to the fun, the scans are out of square, and the photos and PDFs are copies of copies. At least the in-plant only has to make 104 of these””by tomorrow. So, they look at the job, thinking about the labor required, and muse that this is a bit too much, even for their crack staff.
Or maybe it’s an easier job. They have the copy and the art. The customer “just” needs a couple of tri-fold brochures and a companion series of booklets. But they (and the in-plant) have no idea of how to best set up the document, place the folds, or specify finishing, with bleeds on all images. So, the in-plant reluctantly calls the big shop across town to see if it can do the job.
Automate
It doesn’t have to be this way. The technology is readily available to take on many time-consuming document preparation challenges, while simultaneously helping automate a variety of common tasks. To begin, think, for a moment, how many jobs or even parts of jobs are done over and over again.
“Almost anything that is done over and over is ripe for automation,” said Tony Leccese, ReadyPrint product manager at Rochester Software Associates (RSA). This can include preflight steps, imposition, handling color images, deskewing, and more. You just need the right tool, one that will work on all your printers.
Add Value
Production print dealers who help customers streamline document management and production stand out as forward-thinking problem solvers who add value to customers’ operations. These dealers understand customers’ day-to-day operational challenges and deliver solutions that permanently set themselves apart from lesser dealers whose focus is on placing a few more machines and delivering toner and paper once a week. In contrast, they have moved from being a purveyor of commodities to being a provider of business solutions.
Rochester Software Associates (RSA) has long focused on software that empowers the size and class of machines that inhabit schools, municipal offices, in-plant print operations, and even many small and quick printers. These venues are the ones that are often presented with some of the more demanding print jobs, ones not unlike the 87-page disaster described above. Or worse.
Mark Hahn, production print specialist at Novatech in Irving, Texas, knows just how crazy some jobs can be. He recounts how a county government in Texas used to compile a variety of documents that arrived as unformatted data from a mainframe computer. As you might expect, margins, pagination, and the like were all but non-existent. The county uses an RSA product, QDirect, to gather the needed parts of the job, then turns to another RSA product, ReadyPrint, to apply the requisite formatting, enabling the document to run correctly on whatever print engine is specified.
Using these tools, the once complex work was greatly simplified and became just another day at the office. But in school systems every job can be different. Teachers at all grade levels often create their own documents, many of which amount to customized texts that may range from a few sheets to dozens of pages. Such composite documents were once the province of college and university bookstores, where they were called “course packs,” but they have now become common from elementary school onward.
For example, Hahn referenced how teachers in a Texas school system would compile and create these documents at home, printing out pages on inkjet printers and dropping off a file or a hard copy in a school’s graphics department for printing. Most teachers could convert documents to PDFs so the jobs were supposedly “ready to print,” but teachers and graphics teams alike lacked the time or skill to make the document look as professional as they would have liked. And it was at this point that low-quality scans, incorrect color spaces, and multiple document formats caused jobs to slow down or even come to a halt.
For the schools in the Texas integrated school district, ReadyPrint added an advantage that began in the hands of the print shop. ReadyPrint streamlined and automated the document assembly process, from deskewing and despeckling images and scans to impositioning, scaling, and resizing, including adjusting margins as necessary. ReadyPrint leveraged user-defined templates to assemble documents from multiple sources as thumbnail images that could be easily moved, adjusted and prepared for output. Best of all, all of this could be done in a matter of minutes, for an entire document. The resulting documents could be finished and bound based on user requirements without tedious and time-consuming manual steps or the need for a high level of document creation expertise.
“Users are telling us the workflow makes ReadyPrint seem like an extension of Adobe Acrobat,” said Hahn. “The interface is modern and intuitive so people who don’t have printing or document preparation experience can get up to speed quickly.”
Streamlining the document creation process is one advantage, but ReadyPrint also helps organizations save money. “another Texas school system had long been using tape binding on its multipage documents,” recalled John Sutton, director of sales at NovaTech. “This was a costly offline process that added time to document production.”
Looking at the options available through ReadyPrint, it was obvious that using a press with inline saddle stitching would result in substantial savings while shortening time to delivery. Hahn noted that ReadyPrint makes it easier to create documents that need certain pages clearly differentiated.
“Some documents need sections that are different colors,” described Hahn. “Individual pages or an entire section can be specified to use, say, yellow paper. Making this happen is simply a matter of selecting those pages in ReadyPrint and marking them as using yellow paper. It takes seconds. And the software also makes sure the selected printer either has yellow paper already loaded or alerts the operator to put the correct color paper in the machine.”
“The difference,” said Sutton, “and this is a big deal, is that the person creating the document doesn’t have to know very much about the printers. Whatever they may be creating, it’s just another job being sent to the printer.”
Such simplification makes life easier for document creators while also reducing costs in prepress and even at the press operator level. For example, recent research by Keypoint Intelligence states that an average size job requires about 14 minutes of prepress time to open, evaluate, adjust, and send a job to a print queue. Even in moderately busy shops, with dozens of jobs being preflighted every day and an average fully burdened cost of more than $57/hour for an experienced prepress technician, reducing prepress time can deliver a positive advantage to an organization’s bottom line.
According to RSA’s Leccese, ReadyPrint is available on a trial basis, and comes in a basic and “Pro” version, that adds additional features and capabilities. Training is self-paced, so new users can choose how quickly they get up to speed, but they can also turn to their local copier/printer dealer for support. And RSA’s technical help is just a phone call away.
“Once people begin to realize how ReadyPrint and automation can transform the way they work they can’t imagine going back,” said Hahn.
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