Ricoh’s Digital Book Printing Solution Streamlines And Simplifies Publication Of Short Runs To Help Publishers Meet Shifting Industry Demand

London – Ricoh today announced its newest TotalFlow solution that improves visibility into and streamlining of short run and on demand book production. This offering addresses the challenges faced by book printers who seek tools to seamlessly track and efficiently complete the kinds of jobs the modern book market desires. As these printers continue to integrate solutions that will help grow their business, finding increased efficiencies is key to meeting demand. The need for tools to help better track jobs from receipt to delivery and batch similar jobs to achieve fast turnaround times and efficient resource is pressing top priority. The new solution will be available in Europe in Summer 2016.

As requests for short run jobson demand work increase, managing operations and deadlines has never been harder for book printers. Keeping track of so many jobs can be incredibly time-consuming, and manually planning out the most efficient way to lever presses, paper and other resources (without missing any deadlines) can feel impossible. Ricoh’s digital book printing solution was developed to help printers resolve these issues by simplifying and automating many of the steps in short run digital production. A single web-based interface allows users to develop pre-defined rules for sorting jobs, helping to automate many of the manual steps and then batch similar jobs together for simpler printing and finishing. This helps to increase job production, resulting in improved revenues – and fewer headaches.

Capabilities of Ricoh’s new TotalFlow digital book printing solution include:

• Simple integration to printers’ electronic order, MIS and production systems.
• Easy addition of barcodes and custom marks to track jobs and drive finishing.
• Integrated preflight and imposition, minimising touch points, facilitating automation and use with pre-existing systems.
• Intuitive dashboard views of location and status of jobs, with customisable notifications.
• Automatic job batching to minimise turn time and waste.
• Support for Ricoh cut sheet and continuous feed devices, as well as other vendors’ print and finishing equipment.

“The push toward short run and on demand book printing has made publishing hugely more accessible and democratic, but it has also added considerable burden to running a book printing establishment,” said Benoit Chatelard, Vice President, Production Printing at Ricoh Europe. “With Ricoh’s digital book printing solution, we look to alleviate those pains, making it easier for book printers to keep track of their increasingly complex operations, while driving increased efficiencies and decreased turnaround times. This solution provides much-needed visibility and management improvements over the numerous jobs a book printer has on its plate at any given time, while also automating time-consuming tasks like imposition and manual transitions between steps in the life of a job.”

These capabilities continue Ricoh’s work to help its clients drive efficiencies and increase control in their output environments.