Breaking Through Bottlenecks

It took Work House Signs, in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, seven years to reach a total of 500,000 jobs prior to installing an automated workflow solution. It reached 3 million uploads in just three months after fully implementing the software. It is a perfect testament to just how much an inefficient workflow can strangle growth.

Work House Signs' experience underscores an important truth. Your biggest obstacle to growth isn't your people, your equipment, or your customers. It's your workflow.

Bottlenecks in your shop’s workflow — from file submission to final invoicing — don’t just hamper productivity. They can also set artificial limits on the amount of work you can accept, preventing growth.
This is exactly what happened to Enedy Brache, managing partner at Plantation, Florida-based A-Plus Printing and Graphic.

“We went from seven or eight people in prepress to two people in prepress,” he notes. And it wasn’t because he let those people go, but rather redeployed them into areas where they were more needed, such as sales and marketing.

How did he do it? Brache notes that he has a background as a software engineer, so for him, it was an exciting challenge to tackle creating a streamlined workflow. Using FileMaker Pro and building around some InSoft Automation modules, he created a workflow that completely rethought how files moved in and out of his operation.

“I’ve got customers that send stuff via email, and other customers that send stuff via the website, and other via FTP — you name it,” he says. “Probably the most challenging thing is unifying all that, making it into one cohesive bunch of files and orders. Having a system that is able to read all that data, translate it into impositioning software, and let that impositioning software do it’s thing.”

Further, he notes, once you have the files ready to go, “you now need something that can bring that automated file down to your local server, and in a very efficient way and get it to a digital device, a roll-to-roll device, a flatbed, a sheet-fed device, a folding machine. How do you traffic control that?”

Automation is the critical key to solving that problem. And while Brache has the experience to be able to write his own connective tissue to make it all work perfectly for his operation, there are a number of solutions on the market for shops that don’t have that programming background.

Work House Signs owner Robert Cole notes that he doesn’t have any experience — or desire — with writing software, so when he started looking for an automated workflow solution, he needed something he could plug in wholesale and it would just work.

“As printers, we get stuck in what we do, right? And then we don’t have time to talk to other print shops,” Cole says. “We really don’t know what’s out there. But I knew what we were doing was repetitive. And anything repetitive should be able to be automated. So I went to a PRINTING United Expo and started walking around. One booth would lead me to another booth. I looked at some solutions that answered part of the problem but not the entire problem.

“And then we spoke with the people over at [Enfocus] Switch and it seemed like they had a solution, but it was very ‘geeky,’” he continues. “That’s not my skill set. I’m not a computer guy. I don’t know how to write workflows. So it seemed daunting, but it seemed like that was the solution. They made a lot of promises that seemed too good to be true. It really did. I just had to take a leap of faith. And we started seeing immediate results within two weeks.”

For Cole, the challenge was that his shop almost exclusively focuses on orders coming from the internet. And while it could limit templates and require submissions only through the portal, there was still a limit to how many jobs it could push through the system. What started as being able to accept 1,000 jobs per day on the old workflow jumped up significantly.

“Yesterday, we did 180,000,” Cole says. And without the automated workflows in place, that just wouldn’t be possible to accept, traffic, produce, and ship all those orders efficiently.

Lessons Learned

Both Brache and Cole have advice for their fellow printers who might be on the fence about investing in a true automated workflow platform.

Brache says most printers often consider the cost of a new press but very few budget for software and automation technology.

"And that’s where things get a little blurry because there is not a tangible," he says. Since the payoff isn’t as visible as doubling press speed, for example, many hesitate to spend on systems that could dramatically improve efficiency.

He also stresses the importance of not just investing in software or automation here or there, but in a solution that will encompass every aspect of the business, which is a critical backbone of success in a modern print shop. It’s not “just the iron” he notes. And if a printer only looks at equipment upgrades expecting them to be the driver of real growth, they are starting out with limits already
in place.

For Cole, he says looking back, if he could start all over again, he would do “business with automation in mind. Really a lot of the challenge with implementing automation was fixing inconsistencies we had in the beginning.”

Further, he notes, “if you don’t [automate], the print shop down the road is going to do it. And you’re going to be wondering why they’re able to produce signs cheaper, faster, easier.”

To that end, he notes that finding the right partner is a critical first step, especially for printers looking for a solution they can simply drop in and go.

Most of today’s top automation platforms are flexible and modular, and they have teams ready to go to help tweak things to get it just right. Make sure you choose an automation partner that will be with you for the long haul and is as invested in your business success as you are.

For both shops, it wasn’t a lack of equipment, or lack of motivated staff, or even a lack of customers that was preventing them from growing to the heights they knew they could reach. It was all the repetitive, time consuming tasks that make up a print workflow slowing things down. Once they took those tasks off their staff, and automated everything that could be automated, they were able to focus on the things that really matter, things like sales and creative projects.

Workflow automation doesn’t eliminate jobs, it frees up workers to do the things they actually want to be doing, and that brings true value to the operation.

So as you plan your investment strategy for 2026 and beyond, don’t just focus on the iron. Don’t allot all your money to presses and finishing equipment, and neglect the connective tissue that ties them altogether. You might be surprised how much growth is waiting for you.