Print Bubble is an established company that stipulated the web to print must integrate to its MIS. Almabyte’s B2CPrint was integrated to Tharstern
Integration of customer-facing online sales portals and back-office business systems is increasingly offered by both web to print and MIS developers. Michael Walker looks at why and how you would want to join everything up.
Web to print has been around long enough now to have matured into a useful adult member of the print technology family. But its early stages were focused almost exclusively on developing the customer interface to provide an online shop that was always open to anyone in the world with an internet connection, ready for the anticipated flood of new business that would arrive simply from setting up shop online.
In reality, of course, it did not turn out quite like that. Web to print portals, no matter how elegant or intuitive, do not sell themselves, and have to be promoted and marketed. And when the jobs did come in, the ‘web-to-nowhere’ phenomenon arose, where jobs were ordered online but did not move any further without some manual work.
While that is the way it has always been with other job submission routes, web to print not only sets expectations of convenience and speed of response for the customer, but has the potential to achieve an additional level of efficiency for the printer that the other options cannot offer.
In addition to collecting all the necessary files in one place, for any printer with an MIS system, a web to print portal allows many of the key job parameters that would normally be entered into the MIS manually to be captured automatically, saving time and reducing errors -provided there is a link to do so.
Time is money
‘It’s “lean manufacturing”, eliminating non value-adding stages such as someone moving or re-naming a file,’ said Simon Ellington of web to print developer ROI360. ‘The more orders are handled via web to print, the more automation is needed – if you’re getting 10 orders a day you can manage without it, but if you’re a print management company handling hundreds of orders a day, it’s not plausible to deal with them manually.’
Sheer volume of orders is not the only situation in which automating the transfer of job specifications between portal and MIS makes sense. Sean Whelan, EFI’s EMEA director of operations for productivity software, cites the instance where a large customer who mostly provides high value or long run work may occasionally ask for a short run digital job. ‘You still have to do all the back office work, so if you’re only going to make £4 on the job, you’ve lost that before you start,’ he said.
Another situation where customer convenience is the driving factor is in partnerships where the printer is contracted to provide an ongoing print service. ‘Web to print automation can be brought in to meet the purchasing requirements of who the printer is working for,’ explained Mr Whelan, adding: ‘The customer doesn’t want to have to pick up the phone to find out about pricing, turnaround time or job status.’
Degrees of separation
So if this kind of connection is a good idea, how far can it go, who does it suit and what is the starting point? The extreme case is the fully automated ‘lights out’ print factory where the first the employee knows about an order is when the printed job falls into the output hopper, but at the other end of the scale it can be very simple.
‘Many smaller print companies cannot justify the cost of an MIS and rely on a variety of in-house systems to manage their work. I have been to many companies where someone has produced something in Excel and that remains their tool for estimating, planning and production,’ said John Clark, managing director of Almabyte, developer of B2CPrint.
Mr Clark finds that larger print concerns that already have MIS in place are generally aware of the benefits of integration and tend to ask about it when considering web to print, while the idea often has to be explained to their smaller counterparts. ‘They can generally only do one project at a time and see web to print as the more important,’ he added.
Length of experience with web to print is also a factor in the perceived value of integration. ‘Our most efficient customers are the longer-term ones, who have iteratively added the steps towards integration,’ reports ROI360’s Simon Ellington.
Bridging the gap
Given an apparent greater awareness of the value of integration with web to print among existing MIS users, it is no surprise that the MIS developers have been steadily extending their products’ functionality in that direction.
Some, like DDS Accura, prefer to keep a proprietary grasp on the software, offering the AccuraOnline e-commerce web module for access to a secure template-based web to print service, all accessed and controlled from within the Accura MIS and eschewing integration with third-party web to print solutions and the otherwise popular ‘software-as-a-service’ pricing model. In addition to customer-driven artwork editing, proofing and hi-res PDF print file generation, AccuraOnline provides estimating and job tracking capabilities via the parent MIS.
A similar view is taken at Clarity, though marketing manager Emerson Welch points out that its WebShop is not strictly web to print but ‘integrated selling of products online controlled directly from [the] MIS’.
‘Customers control their items for sale directly from the Clarity Professional MIS price list. Orders drop straight into Clarity from the WebShop cart and are processed in the normal way. It’s all driven from one solution. There’s one number to call for the customer,’ he said.
Other MIS vendors are more open to integration with third-party web to print solutions. Shuttleworth, for example has recently struck a deal with Vpress, developer of the Coreprint web to print package, to achieve ‘seamless’ integration between that and the former’s MIS.
‘This deeper level of integration with Shuttleworth installations will dramatically increase efficiencies across shared customer businesses, eliminating many manual tasks, which will ultimately increase net profits,’ commented Vpress’s managing director Tim Cox.
Vpress has also been linked with Tharstern’s Primo MIS, in a neat three-way integration at Precision Printing which saw the web to print and MIS solutions connected to a OneFlow production management system (see last month’s Digital Printer cover story). Precison’s technical director Steeve Roucaute comments: ‘We can definitely say that we have closed the loop and achieved a significant overhead cost reduction.’ A similar level of end-to-end integration and automation is also offered under one roof by EFI, whose Digital StoreFront, Pace MIS and Fiery controllers can be configured to provide a complete ‘lights out’ workflow.
Optimus is another MIS that is web to print-friendly. Managing director Nicola Bisset said: ‘Optimus has been built to ensure that we can integrate wherever possible. We would look to provide integration that enables orders taken from a web to print to automatically appear in the MIS as a full production job, with materials required, tasks to be undertaken to complete the job and the amount to be invoiced being created.’ This integration might be achieved via XML, use of APIs on either end, custom programming or ‘all of the above’. Ms Bissett confirms that the company is currently implementing a link between Optimus Cloud and Vpress’s variable data solution.
Imprint also offers the API route to integration, with direct support for RedTie Template, Vpress, ROI360 Storefront and others, and is open to discussions about other web to print solutions. Job bags can be created automatically on receipt of the web to print order and the job can be linked to a finished stock code with a production order placed against it, including production time for scheduling.
De-MIS-tification
Putting the case for web to print extending to meet MIS is RedTie, whose head of UK business growth Kevin Tyler comments: ‘Customers want a simple Amazon-like experience, but MIS-based web to print has to ask the questions that the MIS needs answering and it becomes a complex technical tool. The benefit of independently-developed web to print solutions is that they are created with web to print in mind, not MIS.’
To extend that simplicity to integration, RedTie offers its users a free XML editor that can be used to create information handover templates for any MIS that will accept the format. Templates that have already been created to suit MIS offerings – which includes Imprint, Tharstern and Optimus – are available free to RedTie customers, and the company will create new ones for previously unsupported MIS for a one-off fee. ‘A new RTT template can be customised by simple drop-down menu selection, making integration very easy, and RTT features can be selectively disabled where they overlap with MIS,’ explained Mr Tyler.
ROI360 started developing MIS integration in 2006 and now offers ‘hard-coded’ support for Shuttleworth, Tharstern, Imprint and Optimus solutions, plus PDF and XML-based options for FileMaker or other hot-folder based systems. There is also an API for two-way communications so that job status can be reflected in real time in ROI360 Storefront.
Aiming to do almost everything from the web to print end is w3p, whose included w3MIS component provides secure online proofing for conventional design jobs, pre-flighting for fixing simple problems like bleed, and a production workflow management tool suitable for smaller printers that allows drop routing and critical paths to be set up and monitored, plus support for management of offline stock-based orders.
If you have already got MIS and want web to print that will talk to it, the chances are that there is something out there that will do it already. If you are in the ‘web to print first, MIS later’ camp, you should not have too much difficulty finding one that already talks to your likely future MIS or that can be made to when the time comes. The question around integration is really ‘when’, not ‘why’.
