Simply adopting a technology on the shop floor is no longer enough – it’s vital to maximize your investment in digital printing equipment. Further, what does maximizing your digital print output mean to you and your organization: production uptime, project turnaround, ROI, customer satisfaction? Printers need their equipment to support end-to-end workflow productivity because your clients are constantly demanding more. That’s not going to change – except to accelerate.
When working with brand managers and retailers – the world is at their fingertips and their print requirements reflect that. They possess the ability to dissect demographic information, and tap into trends on a regional, local, almost personal level. The resulting print projects typically include a wide variety of aspects, output requirements and moving parts. What’s more stressful – it needs to be fulfilled ASAP.
Welcome to the new normal.
You’re not alone if you’ve ever missed the mark on a job because of a challenging media, the inability to match colors, can’t make a tight turn deadline, or turned down a print-to-kit project because of its multiple-format demands. Today’s print provider is faced with a hard choice: Turn on a dime or turn out the lights.
First step, be sure you have the state-of-the-art digital print technology to physically meet these demands. But even the most advanced technology can fall short if your internal team has not been properly educated on its operation and capabilities, if it hasn’t been integrated into your overall workflow, and if it’s not being managed to optimum effect.
Effectively introducing digital technology on your shop floor requires a shift in thinking – from just printing digital images to stepping back and seeing how individual tasks integrate into the overall workflow. This shift in thinking elevates your digital strategy to an operational strategy, and it should hold the top spot on the list of operational concerns.
You are tasked with successfully introducing the highest levels of integration onto the shop floor to meet the broad range of needs in today’s industry. The digital printing strategy must encompass the operator interface at the front end, digital finishing at the back end and all steps in between.
The complete workflow approach allows all the benefits of digital printing to be realized, including flexibility, efficiency, versatility, minimal set-up, end-to-end automation, fast turnaround, short and long runs, print-to-kit, and elite color matching capabilities. Taking this one step further to a sophisticated digital imaging solution – brings the most responsive, cost-effective option to meet the advancing demands on today’s retailers, brand managers and other clients.
Turns out, maximizing print volume and production efficiency is more than faster output speeds. Maximizing digital print output increases your ability to capture and complete more, and more varied, projects that come through your door. Previously-set “high standards” including print quality, color management, output speed and turnaround time are now the minimum prerequisites.
At Durst, we’ve noticed that today’s most successful print providers have shifted their focus from the basics to higher-order variables – versatility, system response times, end-to-end productivity, functional uptime based on capability, and reliability. At Durst, our success – and the success of our customers – has always been based on bringing innovation that both meets and anticipates needs, and provides the competitive advantage. It’s where the leaders are, and it’s where our focus has been from the beginning.
About Durst: Durst Phototechnik AG is a leading manufacturer of professional digital imaging systems. The company has manufacturing facilities in Brixen, Italy, and Lienz, Austria, and has major offices in the U.S., France, United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Mexico, Brazil and Singapore. Durst’s reputation for quality, precision, innovation and reliability spans more than 80 years. For more information, visit www.durstus.com.
