A print manufacturing business operates in the “now.” There are jobs that need to be processed in order to get on press, there are jobs that are on press, and there are jobs on the shipping dock that need to be shipped and then invoiced. The previous sentence is true every single day that your print business is open. 

The priority of the “now” makes it very hard to dedicate time, effort, and brain power to making a better future. I just don’t see many people in a print manufacturing plant who get any discernible amount of uninterrupted time in their day. Most of the work I do absolutely requires uninterrupted time. When building software, you have to think through things on several levels. Often times I’ll have three different screens open because the feature I’m describing impacts so many parts of the software simultaneously. Even with uninterrupted time and the ability to see the connections across three screens, the user story I write will still go through three or four interations before it will get converted to software code.

Software is invading most print businesses. A lot of this software requires uninterrupted time to be able to properly learn it, configure it for your specific business, and strategize how to continue to optimize your workflows to work best with the software. Often times, when printers are struggling with software, the rarest thing to find is uninterrupted time of the key people required to make the software sing. It is frustrating to see qualified, smart people struggle only because they don’t have the opportunity to do a deep dive with the software that could result in greatly reducing the issues that cause all the interruptions in the first place.