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Pattern Recognition as a Path to Print Business Efficiency

Your print business is rich with patterns. By looking at patterns we can find ways to codify those patterns into processes that make us more efficient. You need real human processing for your business—free this up by taking the recurring stuff off their plates.

Wednesday, April 17, 2019

What kind of work does your print business do? This is a question whose answers can go in a lot of different directions. Some printers talk about the industries they serve, defining what they do in terms of their customers. Other printers talk about the kind of print manufacturing they do—describing the work they do in terms of digital, litho, or wide format.

When I’m assessing a print business, the industry might call it strategic consulting. I prefer the term pattern recognition.

Pattern recognition can be defined as the classification of data based on knowledge already gained or on statistical information extracted from patterns and/or their representation.


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About Jennifer Matt

Jennifer Matt is the managing editor of WhatTheyThink’s Print Software section as well as President of Web2Print Experts, Inc. a technology-independent print software consulting firm helping printers with web-to-print and print MIS solutions.

Recent Articles from Jennifer Matt

Utilizing CRM Tools to Sell Print

A CRM tool needs to deliver value to your sales team in the form of time savings or differentiation in how fast they can get quotes out to their customers. Read More

Manual Steps are Piling Up in Customer Service

When the power dynamic is uneven across the functional areas of your print business, more powerful areas (production and sales) tend to shift manual steps to the less powerful areas (customer service). Read More

Stepping Over Dollars to Pick Up Pennies

We tend to discount the time of our full-time employees because we are paying for it already—looking at them like sunk costs. So, when we ask them to do things that are non-value add (aka a complete waste of their time), we don’t see it as a cost. Well, it has real costs. Read More

Deciding What’s Important

In a print plant, it is easy to come to work and fall into the drama of getting jobs out the door. There is always something you can focus on in your day-to-day work life. The art of moving your business forward happens when you direct your focus to areas of your business that you can impact the most. Read More

This Plant Wouldn’t Run Without Me

In conversations with a label converter recently, the General Manager told me that more than once in the last few years key employees had voiced the core belief that “this plant wouldn’t run without me.” Now, you can take this statement a lot of different ways. My initial reaction is concern for the business because the employee that says this is both likely a key player and potentially a risk. Read More

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