Are Fully Automated Wide-format Workflows a Reality?

Like all segments of the printing industry, wide-format is looking for ways to make production workflows more efficient. Automation is part of the answer, but how much can it really do?

Across the printing industry, challenges such as the shortage of skilled labor weigh heavy on the minds of print service providers (PSPs). It’s no different for wide-format producers, who rely on skilled workers to bring jobs through the production, from start to finish.

“The operator level of quality that you get these days is not what it used to be,” says Marco Boer, vice president of I.T. Strategies. “In other words, the $15-an-hour person who comes in to operate [the printer] — who's not only operating the printer, by the way; he's probably dealing with UPS packages and God knows what — they're not properly trained. They're not properly trained because they probably don't stay long enough, and it's too expensive to train them.”

Because of this, automation has become a huge piece of the puzzle in addressing labor shortages. Automation adoption has also become a sort of cat-and-mouse game, with businesses seeking greater automation to stay ahead of their competitors, who do the same in turn.

“So, you're on a treadmill, right?” Boer says. “Because if your competitor gets more automated, then you have to get more automated.”

The Touchless Workflow Today

With so many PSPs seeking to take advantage of automation to boost their success, it’s important to know what this ever-changing landscape looks like.

The first thing to consider when looking to automate is that, as a wide-format provider, you are likely to address a lot of different applications, from banners and wallpaper to vehicle wraps and soft signage.

“Some of the companies will be doing multiples of those disciplines and will require different workflows for each,” says Simon Landau, global strategic partners director at PrintFactory. “So, it's important if a company is looking to do what you call ‘lights out.’ … They really need to understand what those workflows are, what the final product is, what the manual touch points are, and how that production flow is going to integrate.”

While some companies may need to — or, frankly, choose to — piece together automation solutions, there is another way, according to Chris Schowalter, global sales director for large-format and specialty production at Fiery.

“The other ‘extreme’ is you have a company that basically can give you a full portfolio,” Schowalter says, “so you have all the elements from the same company and therefore — at least supposedly — they talk better together.”

However, Schowalter says OEMs are beginning to move away from this because it locks PSPs into using certain compatible equipment, but that “we haven't really seen a clear winner from a strategic standpoint.”

Pros and Cons of Adding Automation

One of the clearest examples of the benefits automation brings to print production is the time wide-format printers are able to save, thus helping them compete with other PSPs, meet demands from customers for quicker turnarounds, and streamline their production process.

“If you do 25 jobs a day and you can cut five minutes down to two minutes, you will save hours in available capacity to produce more jobs,” Boer says.

In addition, automation can help printers maintain consistent job quality, even across different locations or systems. That way, customers know exactly what to expect.

This all combines to create a better customer experience, which Boer says will help convert customers into repeat customers. Regardless, he warns that full automation won’t make all customers happy.

“There's a downside to it, because if you have a very high-end customer — let's say a fine art photographer,” Boer says, “if it's truly touchless, you limit the amount of control that that photographer has over the final output, because you're putting them into a system that has guardrails of what you can tweak and what you can't tweak. And so, for a specialty job, if you will, it's worth having a live person do all of that work with the photographer — and that photographer's going to be willing to pay for it, so your margin is going to be a lot higher.”

Other Considerations for Automation

When it comes to implementing workflow automation, there’s a misconception that automation is primarily for bigger operations.

“Big companies by nature are ‘more attractive’ for automation because you have either some crazy big repetitive jobs, which are great for automating,” Schowalter says, “or you have a super high volume of small jobs that hopefully are already coming in in a semi-automated way. … So we see that the big companies are certainly the early movers when it comes to automation.”

Plus, bigger companies have a larger budget to afford the automation tools and the help to set them up. But Schowalter says that he doesn’t believe this precludes smaller PSPs from getting in on innovation opportunities.

“I think small companies have it actually easier in a certain way because there are not as many people involved, there's not as many touch points, there's not as many structures that have to be changed,” he says. “They just need to realize that ‘No, I don't want to automate it all. I just want to go very targeted about something very small.’”

No matter the company size, once a wide-format provider decides to take the dive into automation, Schowalter recommends easing into things.

“I think a lot of companies make the mistake of thinking, ‘Oh, I want to automate my whole production, and therefore either I'm failing or I'm overinvesting, or I don't know what,’” he says. “I think it's a more healthy approach of sitting down and [saying], ‘OK, I'm scared of all of this, but hey, can I identify just a handful of small problems that I think I can reduce touch points? Let's do this and get our feet in the water and start this way.’ It's a more affordable, realistic, and practical way of getting into it.”

Landau also recommends a gradual approach to implementation.

“We tend to make sure the customers don't build a nuclear power plant right on day one,” he says. “They shouldn't expect it because it's an evolving process, because they're also learning about their workflow, they're learning about how to optimize things that they've been doing manually for many, many years in some cases. So, don't aim your sights too high too soon, because what you don't want it to do is to affect your underlying production performance or impact it in such a way that it becomes counterproductive. The benefits when properly implemented and integrated, however, are massive in terms of efficiency and bottom-line profits.”

How Close Is the Fully Touchless Workflow?

With all that in mind, how much of the production process can wide-format printers automate? The consensus is that there is an automation solution out there for nearly all production steps — from the initial order to setting up files.

“The part where we are lacking … is the physical job,” says Schowalter. “We’ve got barcodes on the job, so that's great. So, once the job travels to the cutter, we can scan the barcode and we can cut, and maybe we are even talking back to the MIS system … but we're still moving around the shop physically.”

To reach full automation, Schowalter suggests looking into technology that can be adapted from other areas.

“The future obviously [is] that we have automated arms, automated trolleys that feed, take the jobs off a printer, move it to postpress, package it up, etc.,” Schowalter says. “So, there's a lot more automation that's on the horizon here, which obviously we can learn from newspapers, magazines, and those kinds of guys that are doing this today.”

No matter how automated things get, Boer believes that some production processes will always require a human touch.

“The consumer who wants a photo canvas print — that's touchless,” Boer says. “But the consumer who wants a print that then has to be grommeted because it's going to be produced as a banner and a canvas print and something else, that's never going to be touchless. There's going to be more and more steps involved and more value-add. So, you can't automate everything, but anything that's basically predictive or repetitive in nature as an application, you should automate.”