Since 1997, Belgian based Burocad has grown into one of the larger online printers in the Belgian market, providing print solutions for a large range of products, from packaging to large format print.
As a company, Burocad has grown over the years and has jumped on the digital train with their very own web to print portal “Print Smart”. Print Smart makes it easy for Burocad’s clients to order jobs and specify exactly the options they want. The downside was that a lot of the downstream handling still require manual handling and checking. In order to grow and get more efficient, Burocad looked for a solution to automate all job handling coming from their Print Smart platform.
For this automation, Four Pees stepped in and performed a thorough analysis of the current Burocad system and the needs and wants the company had for the automated system. This was done together with consultants from the VIGC, the Flemish Knowledge Center for Graphics, to get their experienced insight in these processes.
“Based on this analysis, we came to a solution that would combine callas pdfToolbox Server and Enfocus Switch for the order intake system,” Philip Cremers, Sales Benelux at Four Pees explains. “Based on a series of quality checks and automated rules, the entire order intake flow can now be automated from A to Z.”
With the help of pdfToolbox and metadata from Print Smart, all preflight and quality control procedures for jobs coming from the Print Smart platform are completely automated, without the need of any manual intervention.
“All PDF files now move through the same preflight process, but not all are treated equally,” David van Driessche, CTO at Four Pees reveals. “Our base quality profiles are based on the Ghent Workgroup standards, but depending on the job’s metadata, checks and fixes are dynamically adjusted to fit the job. The variables concept in pdfToolbox makes it very easy to implement something like this.”
With the current workflow a file is deemed “bad” as soon as it has a single preflight error. When a file is bad, it is not sent to the next stage but to a Switch checkpoint. The checkpoint shows metadata for the job, shows a preflight report and enables someone at Burocad to get the PDF file, modify it and re-upload it in the checkpoint so it continues through the flow. This means the PDF file can be corrected immediately or an updated file can be requested from the customer.
When the file has been fixed, Switch will make sure the file name is still correct and then sends the job back to the point before preflight, so the job is preflighted again, ensuring the quality of all documents in the entire workflow.
The optimization of the Print Smart order intake is only the first chapter in the automation story that Burocad wishes to write.
“This is only the first element in a bigger project that we want to create here at Burocad,” Maarten Esveldt, COO at Burocad explains. “After this first phase has been implemented, we want to delve deeper into automation and add specific dashboarding solutions to our workflows in a second phase. With those dashboards we can have a clear oversight of the status of all jobs and also see where improvements can be made in the long term.”
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