I’ve covered the finishing segment for years, and the speed at which the category is advancing is really quite shocking. There’s so much going on right now that it’s hard to distill it down to just the key highlights, but I’ll do my best for you.

The overwhelming theme for technology in finishing is the streamlining of tasks to reduce touchpoints and speed up the process/accuracy/security. Logically, speed is a requirement given that faster and faster equipment placed upstream in production could mean a bottleneck in finishing. However, one of the biggest drivers for combined tasks and automation in finishing is the removal of human labor—a crisis that has been sped up by higher costs of labor, fewer skilled workers and increased competition, as well as the cost of errors at the finishing stage.

With the supply chain issues and paper and envelope shortages of recent years, there is absolutely no room or tolerance for error. Whereas in the past, faster, more automated finishing equipment may have been slow to replace legacy finishing machines that still did their job—a “nice to have” if you could afford the upgrade—in today’s environment, automation has become an essential investment for a host of reasons.