By Craig Lewis, Head of Enterprise Printing, Ricoh Europe
While it is no surprise that the Coronavirus has been a catalyst for change in print rooms – in fact I spoke more about that here – what is especially interesting is how they have adapted to provide new and critical services.
They have met and managed the challenges they have faced by focusing on their customer, embracing digitisation, and developing automated workflows.
This is among the key findings of our Room for Print in 2021 report on how organisations can transform in this changing communications landscape. It includes practical advice from industry experts, Kaspar Roos, Founder and CEO of Aspire, and Ralf Schlözer, technology analyst and founder of The Digital Print Expert blog.
It states the secret for operations to do more with less is to optimise the internal workflow without sacrificing flexibility. It recommends that operations should look for ways to increase automation, for example by investing in new hardware and software as well as integrating or streamlining production processes.
Our The Future of Work report, researched and produced by Arup, explored the impact of technology as a force for positive change. A supporting study of 3,000 European workers found that three quarters (74%) believe that as technology improves and automates tasks, employers must empower their staff to achieve a better work-life balance. Additionally, close to two thirds (63%) expect employers to harness profitability gains from automation technology to re-invest in its people and community.
Print rooms that are reassessing their ways of working and ensuring connectivity to their users, can be supported by Ricoh’s TotalFlow Suite of Ricoh software.
The latest addition is TotalFlow Job Ticket. It helps organisations take control of enterprise printing by enabling the submission of jobs directly to an inhouse production print location. It reduces the overall cost of printing while offering direct access to inhouse print production by connecting office or home working staff to central printing services. The simple job submission and print redirection workflow solution provides full control over document printing and integrates seamlessly with other TotalFlow products, offering an automated end to end workflow.
In addition, seamless integration between office, third party production workflow environments, and third party production devices, allows organisations to improve output management. Rules-based workflows ensure document printing is completed on the most cost effective printer available. Job management is simplified, and print room automation and efficiency are increased by the direct routing of documents to the print room. The inclusion of an electronic job ticket enables full automation of job preparation and printing via Ricoh’s TotalFlow Production Manager solution.
Following early client feedback, TotalFlow Job Ticket has recently been enhanced with the addition of a Business Card module for users to populate brand-compliant templates variably before ordering. The entry level capability allows the production of very short run business cards.
www.ricoh-europe.com
