Tips to Make Your Print Workflow Streamlined and Efficient

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For a web-to-print store, an efficient and optimized print workflow is indispensable. Especially for big print stores with a large number of jobs to handle, an optimized print flow helps mitigate inefficiencies, costs, and boost return on investment.

So, if you are also a web-to-print store looking to make your achieve efficiency of your print workflow, read on a few tips you can follow.

Focus on Making Your First Impression the Best

An attractive theme matters but it is not the only thing that makes or breaks your impression. There is a lot more than meets the eye. Your online print store should have a smooth print flow to simplify order placements for customers.

You should also include the freedom of product personalization in your web-to-print store. To allow for product personalization, you can search for a good-quality online product design software product. See to it that your design tool suits all your requirements and serves the purpose well. Integrating this tool will help avoid back and forth in regard to design-related matters.

One more thing you should ascertain is that specification of design requirements is easy and fast for customers. This is because a tedious and long process may put off your customers. So, go for a user-friendly interface for customers. This will help customers design products in minimum steps and boost repeat business as well.

Track Your Inventory

Whichever be the business, inventory forms an important part. Without proper inventory management, you can’t ensure success. So, keep track of your online print store inventory. Conduct an inventory check on a regular basis to find out if all products and supplies are available in the right quantity or not. Also, arrange the inventory in a way that all products and supplies are easily accessible any time you want.

Regular inventory checks will help maintain the right balance between inventory and incoming orders. It will also help avoid situations like unprecedented inventory shortages, stock-outs, etc.

Automate Prepress

There are several stages between order placement and “actual printing” of orders. You can refer to all these tasks and activities combinedly as “prepress”. Some of these tasks include inspection, pre-flighting, proofreading, imposition, cropping, etc.

Manual execution of all these tasks takes a lot of time and effort. Thanks to the advancement in technology that you can now automate all these prepress tasks. There are several prepress automation software available in the market you can pick from and achieve prepress automation.

This way, you can use this saved time for other important business processes and enhance productivity.

Track Your Print Jobs

Without staying abreast of the current stage of your print jobs, you may possibly fail to notice some minor issues. These issues may turn into a source of major trouble later. To avoid this type of situation, maintain a centralized dashboard for all your print jobs. Collecting all the relevant info at one place will help fetch and update it easily.

Further, your staff members will also be able to update the customers about the progress of the orders. Automation of job ticketing and error notifications will help staff stay updated about the ongoing print job. They can also detect any possible roadblocks well in advance and nip them in their bud to avoid major issues later.

Define Custom Workflows

Defining custom workflow helps save time at each printing stage. However, if you define workflows manually, it may be tedious and error-prone. Several redundancies may aso creep in despite taking utmost care of specifications in each stage.

To avoid this, integrate a print job management solution that can automate the entire printing process for you. Be it defining custom work stages or scheduling print jobs, automating it will enhance the overall efficiency. Eventually, you’ll be able to finish jobs on time and more efficiently.

Final Thoughts

Even a small glitch can slow down the entire printing process and hamper productivity of your online print store. Therefore, you should prevent these glitches to creep in and achieve an efficient print workflow with a few simple steps and achieve a streamlined print workflow

Pratik Shah
Mr. Pratik Shah is Creative Head of Brush Your Ideas, a Web-to-Print technology solution offering custom product design software and Web-to-Print Storefront Solutions. He has been giving his valuable tips and suggestion about Magento product designer tool and other useful Magento extensions.

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