64 email: editor@printmonthly.co.uk March / April 2025 - Issue 353 misconception that automation is ‘hard’ or requires a ‘big investment’ and can cause disruption. “The reality is that automation can be implemented in a very structured way that minimises risk and enables you to control your costs,” explains Bather, who adds: “ZenSmart enables a single product code or a product group to be easily automated end-to-end and used to validate your workflow before scaling up the implementation. In that way you control the deployment to the rate of change that you are comfortable with, and you minimise the up-front investment.” Bather concludes: “It’s easy – start off with a product, expand to a department and then automate the factory. It’s also important to sell the benefits of automation to the team rather than it being seen as change that is imposed on them.” Seamless Integration Also commenting on the subject is Wayne Bodimeade, director of VB Media, which provides web-to-print solutions to print businesses. Part of this offering, Bodimeade says, is an in-built order management tool, which he bills as an effective workflow solution for printers. “The tool can also be used to manage the process whereby orders are either assigned to in-house production or trade suppliers, providing notifications about missing artwork, and show each order’s status,” Bodimeade explains, continuing: “The system also gives users an overview of each customer’s order history, emails, and payment history. as a integrated workflow automation solution, Bather says that the platform can automate manufacturing all the way to shipping, and every stage in between. Bather adds: “From a functionality perspective ZenSmart directly integrates with many order sources such as popular shopping carts and web-to-print systems and has a powerful ZenSmart easyAPI for integrating custom order sources. “It will retrieve the order and artwork files regardless of the source, process the orders automatically making any adjustments required, queue the orders based on your queue rules and then automatically create optimised batches to your business and SLA rules. It features a powerful Imposition Designer to create imposition recipes so that when your batches are imposed they are automatically created with all the custom marks, barcodes, and instructions to automate finishing. Importantly imposition is done just-in-time so that you can select the press-finishing combination required based on machine availability and workload.” When customers look to invest in workflow software, Bather highlights the WORKFLOW SOFTWARE “The VB Media system is by no means an MIS. We initially built it as a way for users to process the orders placed on their websites but driven by customer demand we’ve expanded its capabilities so that it is now fairly comprehensive as a basic workflow tool. Customers on our Pro tier even have the option to use it to create their own workflows to suit their business needs.” In terms of more general advice on workflow software solutions, Bodimeade says PSPs need to keep two key things in mind when investing: software should be about helping save time or enabling new capabilities. “If a piece of software isn’t going to do one of those two things, or if it is going to add extra steps to your processes instead of freeing up time or resources, you may want to think again before investing,” he advises. These closing comments from Bodimeade, offer an apt conclusion to this piece. While there are indeed plenty of options out there for PSPs to consider, they need to think about exactly what they want to achieve, and match this up with what is offered by each software solution. As Bodimeade says, the purpose of software is to make life easier for print businesses, not add another step to an already lengthy process. It's best to speak with providers to learn more about their latest solutions and do your due diligence before making a decision on how you want to move forward with your workflow. SOLitrack v2.6. is the latest version of Solimar Systems’ enterprise tracking platform 2.6 ▲ Enfocus Switch allows users to customise workflows and integrate with thirdparty tools
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