A print business workflow is a series of steps your team takes over and over to get to a desired business result. For example, there is a workflow for how print jobs move through your business from order entry to invoice. Depending on the company and the attention to detail, you may know intimate details of every single step in this process or you may have a general idea of what happens with little confidence it happens consistently each time. Every printer is different.

Workflows can generate what I call “artifacts”. For example; the objective of a print production workflow would be the printed product(s) – an artifact. Workflows can also throw off other artifacts along the way that are not products but part of intermediary steps to the workflow. For example, a proof can be an artifact. A quote/estimate is another artifact that is often generated as part of a print order. The way I’m defining “artifact” here is a distinct object (either physical or digital). When you email a quote as a PDF, you have created an artifact (the PDF) that you created and shared with your customer in order to get their agreement.

We have been hearing forever about the need to reduce the number of manual touches/steps in print workflows because they make us more efficient, less reliant on labor as our only answer to scale. Print businesses need to be able to scale with existing labor levels. This article is about why it’s also a good idea to reconsider our attachment to the artifacts we have been generating as part of our business workflows – thos artifacts that are not a chargeable product. For decades our default thinking has been if we need to come to agreement about something – we need to commit it to paper (or more recently a digital representation of paper - PDF), then it needs to be shared with the other party for agreement. This is still the predominate approach to coming to agreement. I just completed a real estate transaction – what a pain in the butt, so much paper, so many people involved, and terribly inefficient.