(See original press release here.)

Today HP announced a new cloud-based service to support the book publishing and manufacturing supply chain. This new service is named PIAZZA and has been developed around the HP PrintOS Site Flow application. Site Flow is an automated process application that was designed to manage the onboarding of online orders and managing them through production, ultimately for shipment to the end customer, with minimal manual intervention. While Site Flow was initially developed to help HP printer clients, current Site Flow adoption and use seems to be weighted more toward brands who use it to manage their projects through multiple print service provider partners.

The new PIAZZA service, which utilizes Amazon Web Services (AWS) for hosting, has been tailored to specifically manage the requirements of the book publishing supply chain and make the relevant information available to Site Flow. The PIAZZA solution includes content ingestion, a cloud repository, catalog management, order management, global distribution and SLA management. This works in concert with Site Flow, which was designed to focus on the production workflow. A key selling factor is an advanced preflight process based on a publisher-defined preflight profile that ensures the PDFs that are received can be smoothly ingested into the production process. This includes a comparison of the PDF to the book meta data—including trim, bleed, whether blank pages are required to be inserted, etc. HP notes that PIAZZA can also be integrated with the publisher’s existing ERP system. Nothing becomes orderable until the order has gone through the ingestion process and everything is approved by the publisher.