The massive disruption to our printing and digital delivery business in March of 2020 has had lasting effects on many areas of our businesses, especially for print service providers (PSPs) and in-plants. And it hasn’t mattered whether you are in the commercial, transaction, direct mail, book, label, packaging, wide format, or industrial verticals of the print and digital delivery markets. All industries have been impacted over time by variable work requirements (remote and hybrid working methods), the reduction or lack of skilled and unskilled labor, paper and ink shortages, and variable workloads coming through the print and digital delivery production environment. This encompasses risk to those providing goods and services to the market in digital and print output. 

The current environmental and supply chain risks create challenges that can be exacerbated by business and operational processes, catapulting an organization into a high-risk zone. Some of these risk accelerators include homegrown solutions for onboarding work into your print or digital delivery environment. The same applies to highly customized solutions outside of normal product development and support. Finally, we have to look at where human interaction or employee touchpoints—those pesky manual processes create leaks in our production environment’s operational efficiencies. That is a fancy way of saying that these manual processes drive up costs through added time and materials caused by mistakes, file and equipment challenges, and lack of available labor to complete the task. 

What is the answer? Technology. As a thINK Forum member, you are already committed to learning the best ways to leverage technology, especially Canon Solutions America (CSA) solutions that provide amazing final products to the marketplace. As you look ahead at sustainable business practices for your print and digital product production and delivery, it is critical to identify if you are in a high-risk zone after all the changes we have endured since March of 2020. Then, swiftly work with your Canon Solutions America representatives and analysts to take yourself out of this high-risk zone. 

Here are two examples focused on PDF optimization and legacy print file migration; just two opportunities (of many) our strategic partnership with Canon Solutions America offers. 

First, DataProse, a mutual customer of Solimar Systems and CSA, saw up to a 95% file size reduction in their PDFs using our modular Chemistry™ Platform, and more specifically, our ReadyPDF® Prepress Server™ solution. This reduced production time, sped up the onboarding of new clients into their business, and took digitally delivered files to sub-second load times on their eDelivery customer portal. 

Second, we have a large transactional customer in the Northeast that was transitioning work from older competing vendor technology. They needed to take their VIPP print files and get them into a state where they could be handed off to Canon Solutions America print technology. We were able to assist with a high-speed, cost-effective solution. 

These examples show the power of commercially available off-the-shelf or productized workflow solutions that are modular, configurable, and fully supported, as opposed to homegrown solutions with a higher risk. Ask your representative and analyst how the combined power of Solimar and CSA could reduce your business risks and give your organization an ROI boost.