Automation Feature
Empowering Growth: Solopress' journey via automation
Solopress is an online commercial print service provider to both trade customers and end users. Established 25 years ago, Solopress has grown significantly and now off ers a range of products across litho, digital, and large- format print products. P&P examines how the company is using automation to enhance its online profile.
R
ewind to 2010 Solopress is making an innovative move into selling print online, and the decision was a potentially risky one. There was a lack of clarity around whether print buyers wanted to buy online, and the infrastructure at the time wasn’t ideal.
For Solopress it was a venture that paid off and facilitated rapid growth in the subsequent years. While this early adoption served as a signifi cant differentiator, the market has become increasingly crowded, and with Solopress still on its growth trajectory, maximising productivity is vital.
Growing with purpose and productivity
As the business grew and orders increased, so did the number of manual tasks and processes. “Everything's manual so it's ‘drag, click, drop’, quite time-consuming for an experienced press operator to be standing in front of the computer,” explains Peter Storey, Workfl ow Specialist at Solopress. “The company was growing, and orders were increasing,” adds Rob Lagden Workfl ow Architect at Solopress. “It was quite manual checks and fi xes of customer-supplied artwork, so we looked into ways of eliminating those mundane manual processes, those repetitive processes, and we started to look at software, workfl ows, and automation to take those mundane processes away from the operator so they could concentrate on more important things.”
In 2018, Rob met Tom Peire and David Van den Driessche, Four Pees’ CEO and CTO respectively, and was impressed by their expertise, as well as the product they were demonstrating – callas pdfToolbox, a manual PDF pre-fl ight and correction application. After meeting Tom and David, he felt that Four Pees would be a benefi cial partner for Solopress as it
| 70 | February 2024 Simon Cooper
Look at our revenue divided by all the hours that are worked in the business; we've seen a 76% improvement in productivity since 2019
sought to implement automation and eliminate repetitive tasks. “The main issue we had at the very start was making those workfl ows more robust,” Lagden continues. “callas pdfToolbox did that. That was the beginning.”
Finding the right automation solutions
Since the relationship with Four Pees began, Solopress has continued to optimise and fi ne-tune its processes. “As
the workfl ows grew, the more and more Four Pees were helping,” says Lagden. “Over the past fi ve years, Four Pees have helped us make our workfl ow more robust and more optimised, evaluating fl ows we had running that took minutes to perform actions, down to seconds to do the same thing. Out of 2,000 orders a day, 500 are manual, and the rest are fully automated. In the next couple of months, we're looking at the way we automate imposition, ganging and batch outputs based on job
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