In mid-March, the men’s lacrosse schedule of a major university hit the mailboxes of the school's fans and lacrosse alumni. The graphic design was lovely. The dates and ticket ordering information were clear. The print and paper quality were high. Everything about the mailing was spot on. Except that the school’s men's lacrosse season starts in February, the home games were front-loaded, and by the time the mailer arrived, all of the home games had already been played.

Did the university get the file to the printer too late? Did the printer drop the ball? Did everything move as fast as possible only to get stuck in the postal stream? Was it all of these things?

The mailing process, of course, works a lot like the accident scene in the classic film "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" (2008), in which a series of normal, everyday events lead to Daisy being hit by a taxi cab. If the taxi had left five minutes later, if the woman hadn't forgotten her coat, if the phone hadn’t rung, if Daisy’s friend’s shoelace hadn’t broken or the woman in the shop hadn’t forgotten to wrap the package—if any single thing in the chain of that morning’s events had been different, Daisy wouldn't have ended up in a cast with a shattered leg. But life being what it is, she did.

When Every Second Counts

This, for Alan Davis, president of BPI Media Group, is a perfect illustration for why he is pushing print shop automation as far as it will go.

“Let’s take that lacrosse mailer, for example,” he muses. “The thing I'd want to know is when did the printer get the file? When did the proof get approved? Once the printer had the file in their hands, what else was on their plate? Could anything have been shifted? If so, what happened once they dropped the mailing at the post office?" [Truly, who really knows what is going on inside there?]

The principle behind the accident scene, Davis notes, is why BPI Media is investing in a high level of automation. Currently, the company is finalizing a decision on software that will shrink the front-end process (from receiving the file, through preflight and list checking, to digital proof) from two days to three minutes. "Clients are notorious for getting files to the printer late,” he says. “We are trying to streamline and cut time and touches out in hopes of avoiding these kinds of issues.”

Would this level of automation have helped the university get the lacrosse mailer to its audience in time? It’s possible that if any one step in the process had moved quicker—if, hypothetically, the designer hadn’t been out sick, if the proof hadn’t gotten lost in the spam folder, if the printer hadn’t had three rush jobs on press by the time the file came in—fans may have received it before the home games ended.

It’s possible. Because of course, printers could use full end-to-end automation to remove every last drop of inefficiency from the workflow, but just as the work that expands to fill the available space for its completion (Cyril Northcote Parkinson, 1955), clients’ schedules tend to expand to fill the available space printers make in their schedules, too.

Maybe the answer isn’t automation. Maybe it’s Superman reversing the rotation of the Earth to turn back time.