The technologically-driven changes in communications and information distribution have placed new demands on supply chains, including CPGs, print, publishing, and packaging service providers and those that support them. These demands include cost and turn-time pressures, new vertical integration requirements, and a host of new required services, all of which affect the product mix companies must deliver to remain profitable. While the state of the market and some of the newly required tools are starting to find a balance, most service providers have not made the necessary internal changes to adapt. Those who have will prosper, and those who have not will continue to struggle. Throughout this past year we saw new introductions of connected solutions for business and production. We also heard a lot about the promise of AI. However, what does that mean to you and how do you even begin?

Changing a business and/or production infrastructure is at the core of a business and is a very challenging process. As printing and converting firms are faced with pressures from customers to speed up turnaround time, address price pressures, and address an aging labor force, they turn to workflow automation to help squeeze efficiency from their operations. Today and in the future, data and content are leveraged throughout the business and production processes to help automate the entire workflow, which can increase efficiency and reduce costs by eliminating as many human touchpoints as possible. In a transformative workflow, production is also flexible enough to accommodate channels beyond print.

In 2013, I wrote the first in a series of articles on print and packaging service provider workflows. These articles were developed to provide a model for software and hardware developers to build forward-thinking process systems. They were also designed to raise the awareness of print and packaging service providers to the importance of a future proof infrastructure.