How to Achieve an Efficient Print Flow

An efficient and optimized print flow is crucial in a web-to-print store - especially for big print stores that have to handle a large number of jobs in less time. An optimized print flow helps cut down on inefficiencies, reduce costs, and increase return on investment.

Therefore, if you are also a web-to-print store owner and are looking to streamline your print workflow and prevent any problems; there are a few tips you can follow.

Make Your First Impression the Best Impression

Your online print store is far more than an attractive web-to-print storefront. The overall print flow should also be so smooth that customers can place orders easily. In your web-to-print store, you should introduce product personalization. An online product design software product can give customers the freedom to design products as per their requirements. This implies that there would be no back and forth when it comes to design-related issues.

If you let customers specify their requirements from your web-to-print storefront; ensuring that specification of requirements is easy and speedy is important. Customers should be able to design products in minimum simplified steps. So, always go for a clean and secure interface to ensure more orders from repeat customers.

Keep Track of the Inventory

Inventory management is of vital importance for any online store that sells products. And a web-to-print store is no exception. You should always have the products and supplies you offer in the right quantity. Further, they should be easily accessible.

Hence, checking on your inventory on a regular basis is essential for a balance between maintaining inventory and inflowing on-demand orders. Ensure that you never run out of stock and are always able to cater to customers’ orders.

Automate Prepress

Before the ‘actual’ print job, there are some other stages that lie between receiving orders from customers and sending ‘products’ for actual printing. Therefore, automating prepress tasks like inspection, pre-flighting, error-checking, imposition, cropping, etc. can help.

This way, you can save your time and allocate it to other business tasks. Hence, you won’t only be able to save time but also enhance productivity and efficiency.

Keep Track of Print Jobs

Without an idea about the current stage of the print jobs, there are high chances that you accidentally fail to notice some issues and miss out on some good opportunities.

To avoid this situation, keep a centralized system of central dashboards. This will help facilitate collecting all the relevant information together in one place. Through this collected information, keeping your data updated becomes easier.

Moreover, your staff would also find it easy to keep the customers updated about the progress of their orders. By automating job ticketing and error notifications, your staff can get updated about the ongoing print job progress and prevent any possible roadblocks well in advance.

Define Custom Workflows

Defining custom workflow is of great help in saving time at each stage of printing. However, doing it manually can possibly cause several glitches to creep in. It can also lead to redundancies in the workflow despite taking care of all specifications required at every stage.

So, look for a print job management solution to automate the entire printing process. Whether it is defining custom work stages or scheduling print jobs, it helps achieve efficiency in every process. An automation software tool can help finish jobs efficiently and on time.

In a Nutshell

If you face any glitches in the print flow of your web-to-print store; it can slow down the entire process, affect productivity, and ruin your brand image. However, an automation print manager software solution can help streamline print processes and high productivity.

Mr. Pratik Shah is Creative Head at Brush Your Ideas, Web-to-Print technology solution provider that offers Custom Product Design Software as well as Web-to-Print Storefront Solutions.