There isn’t a print business in the world that doesn’t love the idea of automation. Ideas are so easy to love. Ideas come to you over drinks. Ideas can be bantered about forever without doing any work. Ideas and the buzzwords that are used to communicate about them are the core part of almost all sales and marketing language. For example: “fully integrated,” “total automation,” and “seamless”—you know what I’m talking about. The promise of automation is alluring. It causes printers to unload lots of cash with the expectation that they will reach this nirvana. 

My favorite topic around automation is when I get on a call with a printer who wants to fully automate prepress. A magic technology that will convert a customer’s Microsoft Publisher file which uses fonts their kid downloaded from the web and a photo they scanned with their fax machine into a perfect prepress file for their product label! I know I might be dating myself with the Microsoft Publisher reference—I’m still experiencing PTSD from when Microsoft gave that software product away and then those of us working in prepress started to see those files come into our shops. I hated Publisher; it was nearly impossible to get to print correctly.

Process improvement is boring. There’s nothing sexy about even the words. It sounds like hard work. I don’t want to spend a lot of time on process improvement, I want to buy automation. Automation sounds like I’m not going to have to do anything—it will just happen. So, you can see where I’m going. Automation is mostly a delusion. Realistically, there are very few steps in your workflow that you can FULLY AUTOMATE. Process improvement can be applied everywhere. When I mean everywhere, I mean everywhere. Virtually every repeated step in your process can be improved. That doesn’t mean it should be improved, it just means it could.