How Impressu builds practical automation with callas pdfToolbox
Opens in new tab Printing Center USA fully automates web to print and quality check with callas pdfToolbox
Printing Center USA began as a small printer in 1970. Over the following decades, it grew into a major commercial printing company serving customers across the United States.
This growth also brought challenges, explains Kevin Evans, Account Services Director at Printing Center USA.
“As order volumes increased, the approval process became difficult for our prepress team to manage. If a file contained an error or a PDF had no bleed, Customer Service had to contact the customer.
“The customer then needed to correct the file or approve any changes made by our team. Because the entire process was manual, it placed considerable pressure on our prepress staff, who were handling more than 40 jobs each day.
“I did not want our experienced employees spending their time on repetitive and tedious manual work.”
Printing Center USA realised that it needed to automate more of its preflight process to continue growing. By reducing repetitive file checks, the company could allow its skilled employees to focus on work where their expertise added more value.
The company turned to its software partner, Apago Inc., which had already helped integrate Enfocus Switch into its production workflow.
Thanks to the automation of pdfToolbox Server, we are able to handle a lot more orders than before in a lot less time than before.
Print automation with variables in pdfToolbox CLI
Dwight Kelly, CEO at Apago Inc. said “When Kevin started talking about the issues they were having and wanted to resolve, it quickly became clear that automation was needed. You can’t grow like that and keep manually preflighting and approving jobs. That’s why we recommended pdfToolbox Server to perform all necessary quality checks and to automatically fix most problems. pdfToolbox Server CLI can easily be integrated with both Enfocus Switch workflows and Printing Center USA’s custom web-to-print storefront running on cloud-based servers.
Apago’s solution includes a browser-based upload widget and web services for queuing and processing jobs, preflight, thumbnail creation and page assembly. The solution is fully scalable to handle seasonal peaks in production.” The entire development process took less than two months. Apago leveraged the Process Plan capabilities of pdfToolbox to allow both quality checks and fixes to be controlled via job-ticket variables. This feature reduced the number of preflight profiles from potentially hundreds to just one master profile. Variables allow checks, such as page size and color usage, to be dynamically set for each product. pdfToolbox’s Quick Checks significantly reduced the time required to inspect customer files.
Faster order intake and processing with higher customer satisfaction
“Now the entire process has been made extremely easy for our customers”, Kevin explains.“They just check the type of product they want, e.g. a 16 page booklet and upload their document or artwork into a folder. After that, they still have the option to remove or add additional artwork or pages until the product is how they like it. Then the moment the order is placed, pdfToolbox does a check on the spot. If mistakes or errors are noticed, the client gets the option to either fix it themselves, or let the system do this, e.g., add bleed or add page numbers to pages that don’t have any. Once the clients have approved or changed this, the document is ready to go, resulting in faster order intake and processing and as a consequence in higher customer satisfaction.”
Dwight Kelly: “I think what we did at Printing Center USA is help solve a problem that a lot of printers are faced with who are starting up with web-to-print. A web to print portal is an extra sales channel, but it also has consequences on the rest of the printing process, especially if there is manual preflighting and customer approval involved. Suddenly your experienced prepress staff is stuck doing repetitive and monotonous work. With the current system, the web-to-print portal becomes part of the entire automated print flow, and your experienced staff don’t have to do repetitive work anymore. Their experience can be optimally used where it counts.”
Kevin Evans: “Thanks to the automation of pdfToolbox Server, we are able to handle a lot more orders than before in a lot less time than before. Usually, between September and December, which is our peak season, we would need to look for two or three extra people to preflight. I don’t think that with this solution this will be needed anymore. In the current times of the Covid-19 pandemic, the combination of more orders and not needing extra staff to handle them is a double win for the company and our employees.”
