We make investments in additional print software in order to optimize our business. With the mounting challenges of finding qualified labor at all levels of print businesses, automation is becoming even more vital to profitability. Each additional investment in print software builds on your overall technology stack and, as I’ve written many times in the past, there are no isolated or point solutions anymore—everything has to be part of an integrated workflow. 

Integration can slow you down. You have great plans to launch a web-to-print solution, but you’re hampered by getting it integrated into your Print MIS/ERP. You need to modernize your prepress department but again, the new prepress automation tool you’re considering has to communicate with your Print MIS/ERP. So you want to keep building on top of your Print MIS/ERP. What if your Print MIS/ERP is not a trusted system of record? What happens when you build on top of something you don’t trust or have some fatal flaws buried in it? Think about this when it comes to your home. What happens when you invest in the best remodel on top of an unstable foundation? It’s not good. It’s actually really bad. 

I’ve seen printers invest a lot of time and money on tools that cannot deliver their ROI without the Print MIS being a trusted system of record. I like to talk about non-negotiables when it comes to integration. System integration is about allowing each solution to provide its valuable part of the workflow, while communication up and downstream to keep the work“flow” moving. Precise alignment on the core data objects is absolutely critical. (“Core objects” is just a technical way of describing the things you manage in your business, such as products, jobs, invoices, etc.) What if there wasn’t perfect alignment between a prepress solution and the Print MIS on the product/job? Meaning the mapping of the artwork to the right product/job was not 100% bulletproof? This equals trouble, lots of trouble, confusion, chaos, and more labor than necessary to manage the workflow.