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...Found in Translation: Web-to-Print Portals Are All the Rage, But How to Link it to Your Workflow?
By Richard Romano
Anyone who has ever done any kind of statistical or economic forecasting knows that even the best forecasting software can ever really only “predict the past.” It–or the human forecaster–crunches past data, looks at the trends in those data, and extrapolates it forward one, three, five, maybe 10 years to glean what the upcoming trends are likely to be. What this kind of forecasting can’t do is anticipate the impact of things that have not appeared yet. This is why every forecast of the printing industry that came out in 1990 that aimed to predict “the decade ahead” said absolutely nothing about the potential impact of the Internet.
Like forecasts, business decisions are made at specific moments in time and are based on both the state of the business at that moment and in the recent past. Sometimes those decisions are forward-thinking, but more often they are like statistical or economical forecasts: all they can do is predict the past.
“In the 1990s, some printers set up websites that were little more than a digital billboard, but more and more, these have evolved into order entry portals and storefronts,” said Michael Jahn, Implementation Specialist for PressWise by SmartSoft. “These are no longer large print service providers or franchisees’ either; anyone who does business with a customer often enough wants to make the process simpler. It is tough to shorten turn-around times using traditional type of workflows.”
Web-to-print or a digital storefront–call it what you will–is an old story in the industry, and the ability to link a storefront to the RIP and automate the workflow was conquered at least a decade ago. But more and more printers are aggregating multiple “storefronts”: Web-to-print, APIs from other systems, and even physical walk-in customers (yes, they still exist!). The result is a mélange of workflows, each of which has its own idiosyncrasies. They may all be XML-based, but each system’s XML may be configured slightly differently.
Storefront systems use XML fields and tags to communicate job specifications, but how those specs are communicated can vary from system to system. Take as an example the number of inks to be used for a job. Some systems may specify a color job as “4/4” or “1/0.” Another may specify it as “four-color” or “one color.” In order to make automated data processing efficient, all the fields need to be consistent.
As these storefronts were added, they may not have been added with a thought to making the XML structures consistent. The decisions were made without looking down the road to potential bottlenecks this incompatibility may create.
“It’s not enough to use consume and process an injected order and perform XML mapping just to change field names,” said Jahn. “You have to disassemble the data and reassemble it in a different logical way – customers are not only injecting print jobs with finishing tasks, but inventory items and services.”
It’s all fairly ironic in a way. XML stands for “eXtensible Markup Language” and, according to Wikipedia, “defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format which is both human-readable and machine-readable.” It was supposed to be a way of standardizing the organization of data, but pretty soon everyone developed their own unique XML tags and, like the Tower of Babel, soon different implementations of XML spoke, essentially, different languages. (There was an attempt to standardize XML for ecommerce systems, called cXML–“commerce eXtensible Markup Language”–but that soon fell prey to the same problem: everyone started changing it.)
Today’s solution, then, is not to spin off newer versions of XML, but rather to insert a translator between the storefronts and the RIP that will blend them all into a single, standardized workflow.
That’s the value proposition (or one of them) of SmartSoft’s PressWise. In a nutshell, PressWise is an end-to-end platform that includes all the tools needed to manage the print business. It supports unlimited Web-to-print storefronts, and pre-built integrations with most third-party storefronts, such as PixFizz, Printable, PageFlex, PageDNA, Red-Tie, Saepio, and others. PressWise is designed to function as that translator, “atomizing” the data and reassembling it in a way that optimizes the automated workflow.
A lot of companies have found the solution to this problem to be separate workflows, but the problem with multiple workflows is that, according to Jahn, “it creates disconnected silos and islands of activities, which makes the production manager’s life miserable, as they have multiple dashboards, spreadsheets, and reports to review each shift.” Running everything through a single workflow queue–queue-based production–optimizes run-time production. “All these jobs and sources come into a queue, which gives all your workers a chance to see at the last minute when they’re going to run what, what all the compatible jobs are, and where they can be efficient in setting up,” said Jahn.
Although walk-in customers will still exist, the future of print commerce will be in expanding electronic opportunities, particularly as print becomes subsumed into what is called “marketing automation,” or software platforms and technologies used by marketing professionals to more effectively deploy messages on multiple channels and automate as many tasks as possible.
Think about a major potential client using some kind of customer relationship management (CRM) system. They go to a website, fill out a lead-generation form that indicates that they’re interested in a particular product, and would like a sales kit and a follow-up call from a salesperson. “It’s potentially a $80,000 deal and on a one-off basis,” said Jahn. “It comes in, injects an order for a kit of sales response materials, then it’s fulfilled. That same day, that kit is in the mail. One or two days later, that prospect has got this really high-touch kit in their hands.”
The future requirements will be to make even the most customized jobs as templated and automated as possible. That seems contradictory, but there are emerging solutions that can accomplish that
.
It may not be easy to see what or where the future opportunities for printers are, but the prime objective right now is to create a production ecosystem that can not only efficiently process jobs regardless of which pipe they come in through, but also be able to handle whatever requirements the future may demand.
By Richard Romano
Anyone who has ever done any kind of statistical or economic forecasting knows that even the best forecasting software can ever really only “predict the past.” It–or the human forecaster–crunches past data, looks at the trends in those data, and extrapolates it forward one, three, five, maybe 10 years to glean what the upcoming trends are likely to be. What this kind of forecasting can’t do is anticipate the impact of things that have not appeared yet. This is why every forecast of the printing industry that came out in 1990 that aimed to predict “the decade ahead” said absolutely nothing about the potential impact of the Internet.
Like forecasts, business decisions are made at specific moments in time and are based on both the state of the business at that moment and in the recent past. Sometimes those decisions are forward-thinking, but more often they are like statistical or economical forecasts: all they can do is predict the past.
“In the 1990s, some printers set up websites that were little more than a digital billboard, but more and more, these have evolved into order entry portals and storefronts,” said Michael Jahn, Implementation Specialist for PressWise by SmartSoft. “These are no longer large print service providers or franchisees’ either; anyone who does business with a customer often enough wants to make the process simpler. It is tough to shorten turn-around times using traditional type of workflows.”
Web-to-print or a digital storefront–call it what you will–is an old story in the industry, and the ability to link a storefront to the RIP and automate the workflow was conquered at least a decade ago. But more and more printers are aggregating multiple “storefronts”: Web-to-print, APIs from other systems, and even physical walk-in customers (yes, they still exist!). The result is a mélange of workflows, each of which has its own idiosyncrasies. They may all be XML-based, but each system’s XML may be configured slightly differently.
Storefront systems use XML fields and tags to communicate job specifications, but how those specs are communicated can vary from system to system. Take as an example the number of inks to be used for a job. Some systems may specify a color job as “4/4” or “1/0.” Another may specify it as “four-color” or “one color.” In order to make automated data processing efficient, all the fields need to be consistent.
As these storefronts were added, they may not have been added with a thought to making the XML structures consistent. The decisions were made without looking down the road to potential bottlenecks this incompatibility may create.
“It’s not enough to use consume and process an injected order and perform XML mapping just to change field names,” said Jahn. “You have to disassemble the data and reassemble it in a different logical way – customers are not only injecting print jobs with finishing tasks, but inventory items and services.”
It’s all fairly ironic in a way. XML stands for “eXtensible Markup Language” and, according to Wikipedia, “defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format which is both human-readable and machine-readable.” It was supposed to be a way of standardizing the organization of data, but pretty soon everyone developed their own unique XML tags and, like the Tower of Babel, soon different implementations of XML spoke, essentially, different languages. (There was an attempt to standardize XML for ecommerce systems, called cXML–“commerce eXtensible Markup Language”–but that soon fell prey to the same problem: everyone started changing it.)
Today’s solution, then, is not to spin off newer versions of XML, but rather to insert a translator between the storefronts and the RIP that will blend them all into a single, standardized workflow.
That’s the value proposition (or one of them) of SmartSoft’s PressWise. In a nutshell, PressWise is an end-to-end platform that includes all the tools needed to manage the print business. It supports unlimited Web-to-print storefronts, and pre-built integrations with most third-party storefronts, such as PixFizz, Printable, PageFlex, PageDNA, Red-Tie, Saepio, and others. PressWise is designed to function as that translator, “atomizing” the data and reassembling it in a way that optimizes the automated workflow.
A lot of companies have found the solution to this problem to be separate workflows, but the problem with multiple workflows is that, according to Jahn, “it creates disconnected silos and islands of activities, which makes the production manager’s life miserable, as they have multiple dashboards, spreadsheets, and reports to review each shift.” Running everything through a single workflow queue–queue-based production–optimizes run-time production. “All these jobs and sources come into a queue, which gives all your workers a chance to see at the last minute when they’re going to run what, what all the compatible jobs are, and where they can be efficient in setting up,” said Jahn.
Although walk-in customers will still exist, the future of print commerce will be in expanding electronic opportunities, particularly as print becomes subsumed into what is called “marketing automation,” or software platforms and technologies used by marketing professionals to more effectively deploy messages on multiple channels and automate as many tasks as possible.
Think about a major potential client using some kind of customer relationship management (CRM) system. They go to a website, fill out a lead-generation form that indicates that they’re interested in a particular product, and would like a sales kit and a follow-up call from a salesperson. “It’s potentially a $80,000 deal and on a one-off basis,” said Jahn. “It comes in, injects an order for a kit of sales response materials, then it’s fulfilled. That same day, that kit is in the mail. One or two days later, that prospect has got this really high-touch kit in their hands.”
The future requirements will be to make even the most customized jobs as templated and automated as possible. That seems contradictory, but there are emerging solutions that can accomplish that
.
It may not be easy to see what or where the future opportunities for printers are, but the prime objective right now is to create a production ecosystem that can not only efficiently process jobs regardless of which pipe they come in through, but also be able to handle whatever requirements the future may demand.
