Printing businesses face specific challenges, and preparing digital designs for printing is one of the most time- and money-consuming. With so many different printing requests, businesses often have to take a manual approach to printing, especially when addressing design issues. This is particularly true when the design requests come from multiple people and departments. This often results in printing delays and wasted materials.
You don’t have to make drastic changes to your business to solve these problems; simply improving and simplifying your internal systems will make a big difference when implementing a seamless prepress workflow integration.
We will guide you in standardizing your internal prepress systems and explain how integrating modern prepress systems will improve your workflow.
Most companies focus on the final result when upgrading systems, but you must first establish a baseline. To map this out clearly, document your entire print production workflow from the moment your customers submit design files to the final press run.
As you document delays, learn which workflows are responsible. Are technicians correcting designs manually for long periods of time? Are team members using email to clarify design questions?
Identify those roadblocks and set your integration goals. You will be able to measure your integration success by the time it takes to onboard a new project. You will also be able to measure success by the amount of paper waste generated and by improvements in collaboration within your design and printing teams.
You can have the most advanced systems in the world, but if your workflows are not standardized, your systems will likely fail. To avoid errors, you need to standardize how files are submitted and handled.
The file preparation process automates sorting and verification, ensuring incoming files are set up correctly on arrival. This saves your team countless hours of drudgery spent sorting files. Use smart folders or secure upload portals to automate ingestion.
With smart secure portals, clients must follow strict rules about file format, resolution, and font embedding when uploading files. This helps reduce the most common file errors your team encounters during the review process.
Creative quality assurance requires a human eye, but manually hunting for technical glitches, such as low-resolution images, is incredibly time-consuming and prone to human error. By offloading these technical parameter checks to digital prepress automation, your human technicians can focus on spotting visual artifacts, awkward text ragging, and layout issues.
Digital prepress automation is a great way to add a guard against low-quality images and missing assets. Establishing an automated Preflight check system should dramatically improve the quality of the files you receive.
Here are a few of the benefits you will see.
Getting images or documents from a client's screen to print often results in a mismatch. In many cases, images displayed on a screen do not line up well with the final printed product because the systems between the client and the printing provider are not unified.
To reliably and accurately get information from a digital device to a printed substrate, a color management workflow should be installed. Monitors, digital proofing devices, and printing press units should be calibrated to a common ICC profile. This system will accurately and consistently convert RGB images to the correct, most representative CMYK or spot colors.
Following color normalization, the system should be able to handle print-ready file processing. The document will be saved in a locked PDF/X format that will be standardized and optimized for printing using any of the printing systems (digital, flexographic, or offset).
There are many reasons why a customer may ultimately reject a printed product. Often, this is because the customer changes their mind. A major bottleneck in the printing workflow is getting the customer to approve the product. This is often done through a tedious email process that results in poorly formatted threads, low workflow efficiency, and many versions of the same document.
A notable improvement is the contemporary artwork approval process that replaces email with a collaborative digital proofing solution. With this system, your clients can view a digital proof to comment, edit, and sign the approval form in real time.
This system ensures that signing off on the digital portal constitutes a legally binding production approval. It creates an audit trail that cannot be altered and protects your business from expensive product disputes.
There are both human and software elements to integrating new prepress systems. The following three pillars will help to ensure long-term success.
1. Training Staff and Managing the Transition
Your project managers and technicians have all developed the habit of working with older technologies. The best way to prepare your staff for the transition to automation is to develop training sessions that show staff the benefits of automation.
When they see that some tasks will no longer be performed and they can shift their focus to more valuable tasks, they will be more likely to embrace the change.
2. Gradual Implementation
Avoid a "cold turkey" transition that risks disrupting active client projects. Instead, introduce the integrated workflow in phases. Test it with a single account or a specific press line, iron out the kinks, and scale it across the rest of your operations.
3. Regular Quality Control
System automation reduces the burden of quality control, but maintaining quality control in printing on a printed product remains an ongoing task. Quality control requires audits of systems, regular evaluations of automated system rules, ICC color profiles, and preflight settings to maintain quality.
Adding cutting-edge prepress functionalities to your current systems is far more than a simple technical upgrade. It is an essential strategy for reducing costs and increasing your clients' satisfaction.
When you rely on highly automated prepress services, you eliminate time spent correcting file errors and can focus on growing your business.