Ground-breaking RICOH TotalFlow BatchBuilder designed to deliver an affordable, streamlined path to efficiency and increased revenues 

MALVERN, PA – Ricoh Americas Corporationtoday announced its 2014 MUST SEE ‘EMS award-winning RICOH TotalFlow BatchBuilder. This new, industry-first software solution simplifies and automates the batching and scheduling of short-run digital work for centralized job control. The vendor-neutral offering empowers users seeking better ways to meet production demands from high volumes of short-run and on demand jobs, while minimizing labor costs, increasing efficiency and throughput, and more effectively managing jobs.

As commercial printers, publishing printers, in-plants, franchise printers, and service bureaus grapple with these types of jobs, which typically require time-consuming hands-on management, they are faced with increasing costs in time and money. Commercial printers in particular often have multiple digital device installations from different vendors and need software that can pull jobs together from all of them. TotalFlow BatchBuilder software is the industry’s only standalone solution to these problems. It provides users with an open platform for disparate submission methods and scheduling based on pre-defined responses to job attributes. This approach streamlines job ticketing, scheduling, routing and finishing with an ultimate goal of increasing printers’ efficiency and revenues.  

At Ricoh’s GRAPH EXPO #1931 booth, visitors can see TotalFlow BatchBuilder producing batches of bound books, cut-and-stack business cards, folded brochures and more.

“The printing industry is experiencing a number of shifts and one of the most evident trends is increasing client demand for more short-run and on demand jobs. These types of jobs offer users new business opportunities, but also hinder how efficiently work gets done,” said John Fulena, Director, Professional Services and Solutions Marketing, Ricoh Americas Corporation.  “TotalFlow BatchBuilder addresses this difficulty by harnessing the information in jobs to automatically and intelligently group and produce similar jobs. With this solution, users can successfully capitalize on this industry shift, rather than be overwhelmed by it.”

TotalFlow BatchBuilder enables printers to:

Streamline job ticketing, scheduling, routing and finishing by organizing incoming orders from multiple sources and batching jobs based on more than 100 customizable fields 

Automate job submission from MIS, web-to-print portals, homegrown platforms and prepress systems to TotalFlow BatchBuilder via XML or JDF

Track volume of work based on criteria such as number of jobs, sheets or run time 

Manage orders and bring jobs back together after they have been split and printed in different batches for tracking and shipping purposes 

Manage batches by defining output device-specific criteria and routing batches manually, automatically or semi-automatically

Control all jobs in their multi-vendor printing environment, including high-speed digital inkjet and cutsheet devices. The solution is hardware agnostic and designed to be flexible to meet the demands of the typical print environment. It can also assist with roll management of continuous feed devices

View all work based on job properties through an intuitive web-based GUI 

Open, view and download PDF files 

Set triggers with the Alerts feature, which permits operators to send alerts for XML inconsistencies, input/output errors, batch errors and mapped network drive errors 

For more information about RICOH TotalFlow BatchBuilder, view this new video and visit this website:  www.ricoh-usa.com/batchbuilder.

Commentary by Cary Sherburne

During a recent analyst briefing in Ricoh’s Boulder CO facility, we were introduced to TotalFlow BatchBuilder and commend them on offering this unique, standalone solution to the marketplace. There are multiple ways to build batches or gang jobs, but often it can be difficult when print providers are dealing with a multi-vendor production platform.  Many times, the ganging capability is built into a proprietary workflow and not sold as a standalone solution, so this approach is unique.  It earned the company a MUST SEE ‘EMS award and will be on display at Graph Expo 2014. It adds to the ability for printers to more efficiently and profitably handle the growing number of short run, fast turn jobs they must deal with on a daily basis. And the fact that it can communicate with web-to-print and MIS systems adds to its value as print service providers are increasingly looking for ways to take manual touches out of the job submission and production process. The press release includes a link to a video in case you aren’t able to attend Graph Expo to see the solution for yourself.