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“Automation” can mean many things to many people. What does eProductivity Software think of as automation?

Automation is really about removing manual steps, redundant entry, and costs out of the overall workflow. Moving work through production based on events, triggers and status changes, automating the integration of data between components within the wider production ecosystem such as prepress, press and postpress equipment and ultimately all the way to invoice.

Printers are challenged as material and labor costs rise and skills shortages hit our industry. Many ePS customers have moved or are moving to a highly automated manufacturing process, as we have seen in other industries, with minimal human touch points from order acquisition to shipped product.

There are a lot of options out there, and the ePS portfolio has tools, such as eFlow Automator, to help printers create their own specific custom automation to meet the needs of their specific business based on type of production, products produced and customers served.

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How can print software alleviate some of the challenges printing companies are facing with labor shortages?

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We look at four dimensions of the print operation: analysis, communication, automation and integration.

Analysis through better data to make more informed decisions about where to best deploy skills, communication to ensure everyone has real-time information at their fingertips, automation to improve the speed of production as well as reducing human intervention, and integration to reduce the human factor of data entry errors and touch points and all while leveraging existing and future investments.

Wide format continues to be challenged with rising substate costs and automation, therefore has become even more critical. Some of the key areas where we see customers taking advantage of the higher levels of automation are: online orders, ganging of like jobs, tracking of pieces and parts, and onsite and in-store setup and hanging. These are all things that were not available just a few short years ago.