The modern commercial print shop is full of devices that operate at high speed. They are also versatile, enabling a wide array of print products, each with their own production touchpoints. As more capabilities have been added, the production print management process has not kept up in many shops. New manual processes required to handle variations in prepress, print, and finishing mean that sometimes the current location of a job can only be found by walking through the shop. The growth that is fueling the business leads to growing inefficiencies, impacting the cost of goods sold.
Now is the perfect time to step back and rethink the current print management process to rebuild the efficiency that optimizes the cost of producing work and your bottom-line revenue.
Print management begins as the job is sold and comes into the shop and continues to the point of delivery, but if the process is manual it is easy to miss checkpoints and lose track of job status. Customer service representatives and production managers spend endless hours responding to texts, emails, and calls because there is no integrated single source of truth about customer work. It’s costly and inefficient and somewhat annoying as it can be addressed. The solution is to replace manual processes and islands of process automation with a consistent, end-to-end solution that adds transparency, accountability, and efficiency.
For most commercial printers, the production team is the magic that gets the work done. They are valuable assets with deep knowledge on how to meet customer needs, but as the product mix increases and the number of short-run jobs grows, the addition of smart print management relieves them of the status checks and other time-consuming touchpoints.
Enter RICOH Process Director™, the newest generation of print management solutions. It frees valuable production professionals to do their essential work while ensuring that jobs are managed, reported, and delivered with transparency and visibility to everyone in the process. The solution begins with an updated, easy-to-understand user interface that allows everyone in management and production to see and control jobs in real-time.
But it is so much more than a new user interface.
RICOH Process Director adds reliability to the print environment with integrated “Touch and Toss” that tracks print at the piece level and ensures that any missing element is resubmitted and reconciled. It modernizes print management with powerful rules-based processing that enables variable content and even variable substrate selection when supported on the device.
For commercial printing environments suffering through manual processes and living with loose connectivity to business systems, RICOH Process Director enables a single source of truth for the entire production environment.
- No more missing jobs.
- No more manual updating of dashboards.
- No more missed invoicing.
- No more unnecessarily eroding your profits with costly manual tasks and errors.
Modern print management enables smart business processes, production workflow optimization, and access to higher margins through efficiency. What’s more, RICOH ProcessDirector offers a flexible subscription option that removes the barrier to entry, making it affordable and accessible for commercial printers of all sizes.
Now is the time for efficiency in every commercial print business.
Meet the Author
Lisa is the Senior Product Manager for Ricoh Global. She has more than 25 years of experience in the commercial print and print technology industries and has been in her current role since 2014. She has significant experience with prepress and production management and is highly knowledgeable about holistic print ecosystems. Lisa’s experience in the commercial PSP industry embraces all aspects of the print workflow: production management, scheduling, planning, and advanced prepress integration. Lisa enjoys helping customers integrate third-party systems into their Print MIS. She has expertise in integrating products from Kodak, Agfa, Screen, and more.
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