I like the phrase “from order entry to invoice” because it very succinctly describes the route an order travels through your print business, from beginning to end. The question for every print business is this: is your workflow a local train with lots of labor stops, or is it an express train that is automated by technology?

Efficiency is the name of the game, and a printer’s most expensive cost of supporting the “from order entry to invoice” workflow is people. When workflows are facilitated by applying more and more labor to them, you are going down a path toward low profits, high costs, and increasingly error prone processes. The business of print cannot be about a single workflow anymore. We have to examine our customers and our jobs and ensure that they fall into one of at least three distinct workflows, each of which requires just enough labor to effectively deliver on the customer promise.

Your people that are working every day in your business (drinking from the fire hose) often have a hard time seeing patterns because their perspective is too focused on the individual job. When I worked in a high volume retail digital printing operation, it was so easy to fall back on the excuse for no automation/processes – every job is different, how can we automate? To answer that question, I painfully collected job information over a six month period off of paper job tickets. What I found was that every job was different, from a content perspective, but from a print manufacturing perspective, there were distinct patterns and more similarities than differences.