Summary
A direct answer is no. But, for forward-thinking print businesses, automation cannot be optional. And here’s why.
The printing industry is now positioned to expand. The industry is forecasted to top $821 by 2022. Additionally, this segment is beginning to see new waves of innovation. AI, 3D printing, and Robotics are taking the industry to greater heights of success.
Hence, printing businesses are embracing automation and integrating digital technology to thrive and grow their business. If you want to keep up with customer expectations and encourage growth in your organization, print automation will be a stepping stone.
Continue reading the post where we discuss how print automation can benefit your business, how you can automate workflow with web to print software, and what the future of print holds.
Benefits of Print Production Workflow Automation
Print automation is a complex process. It aims to reduce human interaction at every touchpoint, right from order creation to order shipping. Automating your businesses’ workflow can have lasting impacts on a project’s cost, quality, and speed.
Automation Leads to 2 Ps: Productivity & Profitability
NAPCO Research surveyed 245 commercial printers in the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom. The survey aimed to find out how print providers are pursuing automation and what the results are. The survey results identify the following key reasons to invest in tools to automate workflow.
- Automation Improves Productivity – When automation handles most repetitive work, it gives you and your employees more time to focus on other essential tasks. Moreover, automated workflows allow you to accept additional print jobs from customers.
- Automation Leads to Profit – Participants in the survey with highly automated workflows report more jobs per day than respondents with less automation. High throughput links directly to profitability as it minimizes non-chargeable plant time. As shown in the below image, businesses with higher automation can produce 335 jobs per day, while businesses with lower automation can perform 125 jobs per day.
Highly automated workflows report more jobs per day than respondents with less automation
How to Automate Your Print Business with PrintXpand
PrintXpand brings the most reliable web to print software solutions to optimize your daily print activities. Integrable with every platform, our web to print software fulfills all your requirements to automate business processes and improve efficiency.
A. Easy Inventory Management
As a printing business owner, you know that an out-of-stock situation is a disaster. Your reputation among customers suffers because they will not waste time doing business with someone who runs out of stock. And in turn, will go with your competitors. Hence, overall, stockouts lead to lost sales, customer disappointment, and lower loyalty levels.
But with inventory management, you can manage your stock across all your warehouses and sales channel. With our print inventory management software, you can reduce up to 90% of the manual effort. Below are a few advantages you get using the web to print software.
- Warehouse Management – Suppose there is any change in the final stock of any warehouse. With the warehouse management feature, you can update it across all sales channels.
- Multi-Channel Management – Multi-Channel management is a great feature that helps you prevent overselling. You can update inventory count across all channels in real-time using this feature.
- Customer Management – With customer management, you can keep customers’ details, order details, shipping addresses, etc., up to date. Later, you can engage customers through email notifications about delivery statuses, etc.
- Barcode Management – Barcodes help you get instant access to the status of your inventory, including availability, cost, location, etc. This can save you time, unlike manually tracking and monitoring.
B. Get Efficient with a Print Job Manager
Manually handling print jobs is difficult, especially when you have multiple stores and products to handle. With our print job manager, you can achieve 20x faster efficiency in your print workflow. It is an all-in-one web to print software that decreases errors and increases profitability. Following are a few of the many features that our print job manager has to offer.
- Custom Work Stages: With this feature, you can define print workflow stages as per your requirement.
- Customizable Workflows: You can define custom workflow statuses and group workflow statuses for each product as per your printing process.
- Order Tickets: This feature aims to help business owners connect with customers. By creating order tickets, you can avoid unnecessary email communication. With order tickets, you can solve queries like artwork approvals, updated logo files, etc., well in advance.
C. ERP for Printing Industry
At its core, ERP is software that manages and integrates all business processes. A print ERP solution makes your entire print production cycle simple to achieve greater efficiency and higher conversion rates.
PrintXpand’ print ERP software solution offers a powerful combo of modules that enables print business owners to optimize their day-to-day print operations. It includes various features like order management, spend management, print job manager, quotation manager, inventory management, etc. Our ERP for the printing industry follows these five steps:
- Generate sales orders for your store
- Create print-ready output files directly with our Web-to-print tool
- Get print job files based on your sales orders
- Generate work orders and get finish printing easily
- Ship orders using various shipping methods
The printing industry is advancing towards automation. If you want to prepare your print business for the future, you need to automate your business process. At PrintXpand, we help print businesses flawlessly manage operations with our web-to-print software solutions. To know more, click the link below.
Looking a Step Ahead as Automation Gets Smarter
Workflow automation is just the tip of the iceberg. The printing industry is evolving. Greater trends are emerging like IoT, app-based workflow, AI, and technology like AR, robotics.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution and Printing Industry
The fourth industrial revolution is the fusion of advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, 3D printing, the Internet of things, and other technologies. One of the biggest advantages of 4.0 in the print industry is fulfilling customer requirements for faster delivery, low price, and higher quality. Industry 4.0 provides print businesses with an infrastructure that enables them to enhance business operations.
One of the fundamental elements of industry 4.0 is 3D printing. The global 3D printing market size was 17.38 billion in 2022. It is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.92% from 2022 to 2032.
The reason for this significant growth rate is the benefits that 3D printing brings. The main advantages of 3D printing include cost reduction, less waste, reduce errors, and more.
AI Revolutionizing Print Industry
Nowadays, AI is everywhere, and the print industry does not lag in taking advantage. By improving the effectiveness of printing processes, the technology has the potential to increase the revenue stream for your business.
Printing businesses are using AI to speed up production time, cut down on waste, and more. Here are a few examples of how AI can benefit your printing business:
- Print AutomationOne of the most common uses of AI in the print industry is to automate tasks. By removing bottlenecks in the printing process, AI can speed up processes and significantly reduce the manual workload. As you automate some of your routine work, you can focus on other important tasks like shipping, tracking inventory, etc.
- Predictive MaintenanceWhen you combine artificial intelligence and big data, you can drive greater efficiency by predictive maintenance. For example, artificial intelligence can analyze data from printers and predict a breakdown or failure. The technology can even make real-time decisions based on sensor feedback. This includes the decision about software upgrades, detecting errors in alignment, etc. In short, AI can not only predict failure but also take care of the problem itself.
You can read more about AI and the printing industry here.
Prepare Your Business for Print Automation
Today, businesses in every industry are on the fast track to automation to drive better results. In 2020, McKinsey & Co. conducted a global survey of business leaders from a wide cross-section of industries. According to that study, 66% were piloting solutions to automate at least one business process, up from 57% two years earlier.
With innovations in the print industry developing rapidly, print businesses must take a step in this direction. Automating print workflow will enable you better serve your customers, increase efficiency, and make more profits.
PrintXpand is here as your reliable tech partner to fulfill your print automation needs. Our solutions – Print Inventory Manager and Print Job Manager can be a perfect solution to ensure your print workflow remains glitch-free. In our 14+ years of experience, we have helped print businesses like yours level up their business with the right automation solutions.
Drop us a message, and we will get in touch with you.
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