Your print business contains challenges specific to each functional area. For example, your prepress team needs to efficiently translate the files submitted by your customers into press-ready art as a critical step in your overall order workflow. This is a specific challenge, in a specific functional area of your business, that is also part of an integrated workflow (order processing) that is foundational to your overall business success.

There are many other examples of specific challenges in specific functional areas of your print business. The aspect of this puzzle that I want to focus on is the interrelatedness of each of these challenges to the creation of effective end-to-end integrated workflows. You want to solve specific challenges AND make sure those solutions work and play well with the workflow steps upstream and downstream of them in the workflow. You must think about solving your challenges from both perspectives: the perspective of the individual employee working in prepress who requires the proper toolset to get their job done at a higher quality rate and more efficiently. You also must think about how a solution in prepress works well with customer service, production, and the tools those teams are using.

I have seen decisions that were too heavily weighted on the individual job to be done in a functional area. These decisions resulted in a solution that worked well for prepress but caused additional challenges up- and downstream due to its inability to integrate with other solutions. I have seen decisions that were too heavily weighted on the integration between departments and didn’t solve the challenge in the department. These decisions resulted in a functional area (prepress) still severely impacted by their specific challenges, slowing them down and essentially preventing any gains from the added interoperability.