Do You Need a Dedicated Workflow for Digital Textile Print?

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If you are producing digital textiles or working with direct-to-garment solutions, you know that building the right workflow can be a challenge. The elements are evolving to meet new production requirements and to take advantage of new types of workflow solutions. It isn’t only the types of fabric and inks that keep changing either; it is how designers want to buy those production jobs that expands continuously. If you are adding digital textile production to your traditional textile production shop, or adding digital textile production to your existing digital production offerings, the key to your success will be your business and production workflows.

Is Workflow Necessary?

You have a workflow, whether it is a formal set of software solutions and process steps or a set of sticky notes and knowledge held by experts on your production floor. The question is do you have an optimized workflow? This is a great time to look at the options for tuning up your existing workflow processes and adding new workflow solutions to optimize throughput and margins.

Starting with the basics, your textile workflow should have a way to capture job requirements in a consistent and comprehensive way. It should have a way to interact with business systems to capture, track and close the loop on the accounting. You will also want to interface to the systems used to manage manufacturing requirements and material movement, including spreadsheets, job travelers or Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) that manage inventories of raw materials. That means ensuring you have workflow tools that will play well with your business and production systems. Look for solutions with APIs and SDKs to ensure data captured can be turned into actionable information.

Your workflow should be capable of pushing files from onboarding through to preparation for print in as automated a manner as possible. Your goal is to ensure that the files sent to the DFE for the press are normalized and optimized. If you cannot onboard a job, get it set up, preflight it, take care of any anomalies and get it into production with minimal touchpoints, this is a good time to audit the workflow and make the adjustments that give you optimal throughput.

Workflow Components

Web-to-print offerings are growing in both direct-to-garment and digital textile production, but to be most effective they should be capturing pricing, fabrics, finishes and delivery requirements. An integrated digital storefront allows you to access new types of customers and provide a variety of short run services you might not have considered in an analog mind set.

In a digital production workflow, your order management system, preflighting environment and systems that manage scheduling may need updating to accommodate a larger number of short run orders. No matter how basic or sophisticated the current workflow is, take the time to do a workflow audit to assess how to move smoothly into digital production. Talk to your current workflow tool providers and take the time to investigate potential new providers with digital textile workflow experience. You may discover solutions that will allow you to optimize your business and protect and increase margins.