This article is sponsored by First Line Software as part of WhatTheyThink's Print Software Product Spotlight series. In preparing this article, the WhatTheyThink Print Software Section editors conducted original, in-depth research on First Line’s custom software and data solutions. This Product Spotlight describes what the editors feel are the products’ strengths in the marketplace. First Line Software reviewed the final article for accuracy but had no editorial control over the content.

Watch Pat McGrew and Ryan McAbee’s video interview with the First Line Software team here. 

In business, agility refers to our ability to move quickly and with flexibility. It’s an essential tenet to becoming successful in changing times, but the ability to respond to market shifts can be challenging. In the best of times, your print operation grows and responds to technological shifts, market conditions, and customer preferences. In these challenging times, do you have the business agility and enough data points to create a competitive advantage, accelerate your digital transformation, and increase your market share?  As a business, can you quickly capitalize on market changes with ease, or do you move at a glacial pace due to the uncertainty of your business performance and operations? Do you have enough data to analyze or predict the critical items of your process? 

It can be challenging for print businesses to be agile, particularly production printing rooted in small-batch, custom manufacturing. Providing a wide range of printed products and services across a diverse customer base is difficult. The complex supply chain and custom manufacturing processes routinely change en routeand from job to job, multiplying the challenges. An agile manufacturing process ensures customers receive their print products within the requested deadline or service level agreements (SLAs) and at the quality level they demand. Increasingly, software solutions and the underlying data flowing through them are the foundation for creating a resilient manufacturing process that adds to the business’s bottom line. To reach the peak of business agility, you may need another form of agile—to be agile using software and software services.

Software solutions are added over time, often to solve ad hoc problems, customer-specific issues, or temporary challenges. Unfortunately, these software decisions too often lead to a jumbled set of dysfunctional acronyms and create a disjointed production environment. You may own multiple instances of each type of solution, preventing the seamless flow of mission-critical information (data) and automation. In other cases, the business needs may simply outpace the features and functionality of the off-the-shelf software solutions. In these situations, custom software development is often the best path forward to improve the flow of data and improve business outcomes. The best solution will connect different systems and create a holistic flow of the business process.

First Line Software is a developer of custom software and data solutions that understands the needs of all types of printing companies, including those that specialize in labels. Founded over 15 years ago in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the company focuses on agile custom software development and digital transformation. Leveraging a 400+ strong team of experts across the globe means First Line Software can quickly scope and deliver a purpose-built software solution to solve your biggest business challenges. The process typically starts with a discovery workshop to quickly identify the business challenges and how they can be addressed through a custom software solution. For example, consider the challenges label printers face. Multiple long and short-run orders arriving with different size, shape, and finishing requirements that must be output across different print and finishing equipment. A custom software development project could streamline this onboarding process from multiple incoming sources, including web-to-print, and connect the processing path and required data for downstream processing. For this type of engagement, once the discovery workshop is complete, the experts from First Line Software can propose a solution, which will streamline your process in a more optimal way.  

First Line Software is a custom software development business that uses processes perfected over hundreds of customers and thousands of projects. Unlike print industry manufacturers and software vendors, they routinely adapt solutions and best practices that have worked in other industries and apply them to the printing industry. 

For one client, they created a custom interface for templates, with user and business rules for each print product. The custom software allowed end-users to tailor their marketing based on location and on-the-ground knowledge, like custom discounts or promotions. Based on the successful rollout, First Line Software is currently working on moving that on-premise solution to the cloud for further scalability and efficiency. 

Moving to the cloud companies opens a lot of opportunities, and it is not only cost-saving. The companies can operate in a more resilient and a more agile way. They can do a lot of experiments. And the most important one is that it allows companies to collect data. Right now, DATA is the genesis for modern inventions. 

With a great range of capabilities, First Line Software has focused on connecting data across many sources. Once the data is accessible, they leverage machine learning to improve manufacturing operations. Typically, the first use is exposing the information in a way that is actionable for management using analytics dashboards. In more advanced uses, the data can be analyzed using AI methods to forecast consumable (ink, paper, etc.) demand, predict equipment failures, or find manufacturing anomalies. The goal is to create more intelligent, faster, and more responsive manufacturing businesses.

In other projects, First Line Software has improved existing software solutions with tremendous results. One large provider of data solutions needed to increase its processing throughput due to the large processing demand routinely placed by its customers. The software had to process hundreds of thousands, millions, and even billions of data requests based on their client’s needs, such as hundreds of thousands of transactions for a global shipping company each day. The expert team at First Line Software leveraged their capabilities to increase their processing throughput by ten times over the previous level saving additional incremental IT costs.

These examples overlap challenges in the printing industry where successful operations, from commercial printers to packaging converters, are more and more dependent on the collection, analysis, and execution of data available across the organization. Your off-the-shelf software solutions may provide you with some data and results, but this process stays separate, and you as the company may get more benefits if you put this process inside the main sophisticated business process.  First Line Software can leverage its experience in the printing industry and software development to create the solution for taking your company to the next level.