This originally appeared on Inkjet Insight. Inkjet Insight is the industry's source of unbiased information for companies evaluating, using or developing production inkjet. Visit Inkjet Insight.

Adopting inkjet into a print workflow is now so common it is easy to believe that the workflows to support this technology have approached the status of an Easy Button. Bring in inkjet and magically your workflow reconfigures itself to handle the differences in specifications, including color and finishing. It would be great if it were true, but we aren’t there yet. Today, there are three common pain points creating friction: people, materials, and capital expenditures. Each is needed to support migration to or addition of inkjet technology to print production. How you approach them can change your profit options.

The labor situation in print today is challenging. Not every company is back to full staffing. For many, the staff they work with today are not at the same knowledge level as the staff they worked with before 2020. The result is that some work is done manually, and not always consistently. You may see more job rework and reruns, missed specification changes, mispriced work, and profit margins eroded by a long series of small incidents during production.