When printers buy a press, they prioritize around training for their operators. The operators engage and ask lots of questions. The printer and the press vendor are in almost constant communication that first couple weeks of operation. Running the press is vital to the success of the organization. The more skilled your press operator is the better quality they will produce with the press and the more chance of differentiation over the other printers who bought the same press.

Why don’t we do this same thing with print software?

I was in a print manufacturing facility the other day, there were two primary software packages being utilized to move orders through the plant; a Print MIS and a production management/pre-press tool set. I could not get a consistent answer on who was the expert on either system, nor was I hearing anything close to confidence about their current utilization of either system. Between these two systems, people were spending many hours a day on them, yet nobody really knew how they really worked. Here’s the real irony, it was easy to get people to complain about what “they thought the systems did poorly.”