Ian Gordon, operations director, Tangent
Enfocus says its Switch automation software streamlines workflow, speeds up production times, cuts costs and avoids errors – exactly what is happening at Tangent Group’s several UK sites.
Faced with the convergence of two industry trends – an increasing number of short run jobs coupled with a broadening customer base – Tangent turned to Enfocus and Switch 11 to profitably handle as many as 2500 orders per day across multiple product lines.
With a £21.7 million annual turnover, Tangent has a portfolio of bespoke and online companies specialising in print production and digital marketing. These include Goodprint.co.uk, Printed.com, Smileprint.co.uk, Ravensworth, Tangent Snowball and Tangent on Demand.
The project to streamline and automate workflow across the group was headed up by Brian North, Tangent’s group workflow specialist. He explained: ‘We’ve always had the need to manage data and file transfers from a variety of sources to a variety of production platforms, both internal and external. We had been utilising various different solutions, but the sheer volume and complexity of traffic meant we had to reconsider what we were doing and find a single solution that could support the entire group.’
Tangent especially needed to streamline workflows associated with work coming in from online services Goodprint and Printed.com, as well as vertical property print specialist Ravensworth, with all of that work flowing into the group’s production centre near Newcastle.
Mr North added: ‘We also have smaller specialist suppliers receiving work as well as our own high volume production facilities. We were looking for a unified workflow that would allow us to manage multiple processes from a single interface. Colour profiling, file types, and file conversion are all factors that influence what we need to send and when and where to send it, and we needed to be able to automate those as much as possible.’
Time to make the Switch
Tangent chose Enfocus Switch 11 to handle multiple flows of varying complexity across the entire organisation for its production, backup and development platforms. Switch has allowed the company to transform what was a collection of often disconnected processes into a unified whole that gives it a single-platform prepress model seamlessly operating across multiple company and partner locations.
Enfocus Switch 11 is a powerful workflow solution designed to automate as many repetitive operations as possible, freeing users to spend their time on more productive activities without being concerned about the errors and mistakes that can easily occur during the performance of recurring tasks. Automating these tasks with Switch ensures accuracy and increased employee satisfaction as their attention is turned to more challenging activities.
Primary uses of Switch at Tangent include preflighting, file conversion, and the correction of files as necessary – either automatically or by exception through the SwitchClient interface. Switch also automates the process of building JDF job tickets, integrating with various databases to combine the necessary information into an XML template. As Tangent has gained experience with Switch, the company has discovered many other uses for the automation tool, including file routing, email report generation, file delivery, and client notifications.
Printed.com is one of the online companies benefitting from Switch
Mr North described Switch’s immediate impact as ‘excellent,’ adding: ‘It has served us well and provided a solid platform for collating and managing data for print production, email generation and database integration. We receive up to 2500 orders a day, and each one can include multiple PDFs. Switch has reduced the manual handling of files by half. Without Switch, we likely would have had to expand the prepress team. With Switch, we are able to get more work done without the need to add headcount.’
He continued: ‘Switch pulls everything together. Although we have multiple publishing and consumption methods, there is now a defined, centralised workflow for managing, processing and distributing files, as well as updating and interacting with several databases. We needed a solution that was as ‘open source’ as possible to allow full XML automation as well as integration of third party applications and configurators. Switch was the ideal solution to meet those requirements.’
Also important was scalability and flexibility, he said: ‘We didn’t want to get tied into anything that was proprietary or that was incompatible with our publishing systems, our production devices, or anything else we might introduce in the future.’
Significant workflow improvements
Tangent’s operations director Ian Gordon commented: ‘Now we have one set of standards for file preparation, imposition and prepress. Some of our workflows have a higher degree of automation than others. Switch understands what level of automation is in play as well as where automation doesn’t exist and human intervention is required. We are still working toward complete automation, but we are making good progress in building flows that will get us there.’
Switch has also helped with workflow management, according to Mr Gordon: ‘We had lots of disparate and isolated pockets of work from prepress up to the point of print that over time had meant we lacked a common and uniform approach. Implementing Switch has given us the ability to normalise processes. We now have a transparency of workflow within the group and with our customers and partners. That gives us greater control and resilience. Before, many files required a great deal of manual interaction, and now we are not so highly dependent on human touch points.
‘For example, we can quickly and easily see when a job is not fit for press and why, what needs uploading and if there is a need for the application of bleed – incidentally something else we have now automated. In other words, we are managing by exception, only intervening in the process when necessary.’
Large format speed increase
According to Brian North, a significant improvement has been in the large format aspect of the group’s business. Before Switch, it could take hours or in some cases longer to turn around a job because of the time it took to get through prepress. Now a large format job can be on the press almost immediately. ‘Virtually every job ticket in large format is correct (having been updated via Switch) when the job reaches production, and this has dramatically sped up the whole process.’
Brian North
In addition to faster, more efficient job throughput, there are a number of ways the group will continue to benefit longer term, according to Mr North, who added: ‘We now have more capacity, which means we can grow without incurring extra costs.’
What the future will bring
‘Tangent presents an ideal situation for the implementation of Enfocus Switch,’ said Maxim Heyndrickx, sales account manager at Enfocus. ‘We never expect that Switch itself can meet 100% of customers’ challenges. That’s why we built it as an open solution that easily and seamlessly integrates with almost any third party application. This includes database modules, image manipulation modules, file conversion modules, XML generators and editors. Tangent is now, or shortly will be, taking advantage of almost all of those capabilities and will continue to adapt and integrate both its own in-house applications and readily available public domain products to carry out required tasks more efficiently.’
Ian Gordon added: ‘There are more improvements to come but there is no question that we are in a much better position today than we were 12 months ago, so for us Switch has been a great investment.’
Brian North agrees and despite the significant changes the team has been able to implement already, states: ‘We are not stopping here. We continue to work closely with Enfocus to explore additional opportunities and to provide feedback relative to future product development. Our close links with R&D within Enfocus have been invaluable.’
He concluded: ‘Switch provides a single point of reference for all incoming traffic to all delivery points. It means a greater chance of ‘first time’ success on job production and a greater chance that inconsistencies will be dialled out before hitting the production stage. This is particularly important with ‘public domain’ artwork – a key element of some of our traffic.’
