When I think about automation, my mind dives into the weeds of software since my perspective on the print industry for my entire career has been from the software perspective. So, automation to me really equates to things happening in a programmatic fashion. What do I mean by programmatically? For example, a customer places an order in a web-to-print solution and that order is programmatically added into the Print MIS/ERP by software rather than a human using their brain power and time to input it into the Print MIS manually. Or an artwork file is automatically linked to a job in the Print MIS/ERP by a prepress automation tool which provides the press operator with a single click to retrieve approved artwork at the time of production.

Programmatically. It’s a very powerful word. And it is very different than manually done by humans. The primary difference is that you must define everything precisely when you are programmatically implementing something. Software programs only do what you tell them to do. They cannot come up to the line of scrimmage and call an audible based on how they see the defense lining up. They can’t abandon a screen and back cut to the basket when their defender is overplaying them. Programs just do what they are told. Humans can make audibles. Humans can make back cuts to the basket. Humans can look at a situation and decide the standard process does not apply here and they can choose to do something else altogether. 

You might be thinking at this point, I want my business to be able to call audibles. I want my business to be able to decide when to back cut to the basket. A lot of businesses are run this way. The culture is that we are flexible to an extreme. We can constantly shift to adapt to our surroundings. Doesn’t this sound like a positive thing? It is not. It is chaotic. It is slowing you down. It is making you highly inconsistent. It is costing you a lot of money because you are managing everything that happens in your business as if it's a special project. Every single job in your print business is not special. Don’t try to convince me of this. There is always an 80/20 rule. There are patterns. There are recurring tasks that are done repeatedly, every single day.