Sponsored Content
By Tony Curcio
With production facilities in CA and NJ and over 60,000 customers, Printivity continues its mission to deliver unmatched customer service and top-quality print products quickly and at the lowest possible prices.
Founded over a decade ago by Lawrence Chou, CEO, Printivity, the print, bindery, design, mailing, and fulfillment specialist, had its sights on automation as the next logical step in its continuing growth.
Invested in Long-Term Success
In April of 2022, Lucero Kabashima, prepress manager, Printivity, set out to identify bottlenecks and potential savings and efficiencies within the prepress department. Prinitvity had purchased some automation software—Enfocus Switch and Pit Stop Server—but realized it needed help with implementation to unlock its full potential. She found Significans Automation listed on Enfocus’ Website as one of its highest-tiered implementation partners. “Other companies gave us a sense that we were just another customer,” said Kabashima. “But Significans showed that they really cared and were more invested in our long-term success.”
“We consider ourselves fortunate when a customer like Printivity engages with us, particularly when they have a clearly defined strategy. This gives us the ability to guide the project based on a specific, detailed, process-improvement plan that will yield measurable results,” says Marc Raad, president, Significans Automation.
A Highly Customized Solution
The majority of Printivity’s orders are for marketing products. The company always seeks ways to reduce waste and improve customer service and print quality. This means improving turnaround times, streamlining processes, and automating cumbersome production tasks. Kabashima’s challenge was to improve throughput, automate repetitive work, reduce errors, and support growth within the organization—without adding prepress staff.
With daily artwork coming from online customers with various levels of expertise, files were often submitted in the wrong format, had incorrect dimensions, or were missing key production information. In the past, too much time was spent manually adjusting files to ensure that orders came out as requested. The company now uses software customized and deployed by Significans to automate these tasks, freeing up prepress personnel to focus on higher value work.
The next targets for improvement were preflighting inefficiencies. “Whenever we had preflight warnings, prepress manually reviewed the files, looked at the warnings, and added notes that got sent to the customer for follow-up. The software has now taken over a lot of this work as well,” Kabashima adds. “Significans Automation set up a system where the preflight warnings get translated automatically and added into notes within Enfocus Switch, so that prepress really just needs to open an order and quickly review it, to make sure everything comes out correctly.”
Measurable Results
All this automation has an unprecedented impact on Printivity’s bottom line. By automating repetitive tasks and redeploying staff to higher-value functions, Kabashima reported a decrease in prepress staff hours of about 50 percent, with 25 percent fewer orders requiring manual work. Plus, the time it now takes an average file to go through prepress has been reduced by a huge 31 percent. Overall, she estimates that these efficiencies translate to savings of six figures per year, a figure she expects to increase over the coming years.
“An added benefit is we are now able to take on more business, so I’ve given management the green light to beef up our marketing efforts, expand our product lines, and gain more orders,” she adds. “When we set out on this journey, we weren’t just looking for a vendor,” says Kabashima. “We wanted a partner that could help us best navigate our foray into the world of automation. We found that partner in Significans Automation.”
For a review of your print shop’s specific workflow automation needs, call Significans Automation at 1-877-463-4465 or visit significans.com.
Jan2024, DPS Magazine
