Wide Format Imaging

If someone showed a better way to do household tasks such as find hardware, shop for groceries, or wash laundry, anyone would probably listen. In the wide-format workflow world, there is also a “better way” of doing the work: to save time, make scheduling easier, redefine flow and—believe it or not—increase interaction and morale.

When you say the phrase “digital assembly line workflow,” most people—even in the acronym and term-filled reprographic world—will feel their eyes start to glaze over. But this method of making workflow more defined in the new digital world can be applied to everyone from large shops to those people with two wide-format machines.

Methods differ only a little in the scenario for a designated workflow area. John Cronin III, president and CEO of PLP Digital Systems, a software developer for PlotWorks and OpsCenter, Arlington, VA, said when they consult with companies, they often encounter scanning and printing methods that are inefficient. Scanning takes up production time that could be used for printing, so some reprographers put it off. They advise people to have separate scanning and printing departments going to a digital workflow area controlled by a queue operator sometimes called a “traffic cop.”

“When you separate the scanners and the printers, what you find out is that you need less equipment, actually,” Cronin said. “You definitely need fewer scanners if everything you had were copiers. Another thing you will find in the way the devices are designed right now, is that if you’re printing a large job, you can’t also be scanning. If you’re scanning a large job, you can’t be printing at the same time. So what people do to get work out is to actually acquire extra equipment. When you run the numbers, we have found a company like that has only about 25 percent utilization of their capacity.”

“The reprographic industry is used to scanning, printing, and removing things, like paper,” said Curtis Metz, product manager and analyst for A&E - The Graphic Arts Complex, Houston, TX. But with the workflow design, “we’re not scanning to print,” he said. “We’re creating digital files. The scanning department can keep on scanning. They’re not involved with the printing process, at all. They’re removed totally from the process.”

Cushing & Color in Chicago, IL, has three defined areas—document control, scanning, and large-document printing. Horacio Solis is the manager of the large-document output department and OpsCenter software optimizes machine use on his monitors.

The top screen shows how much time the job will take when it is sent to a print engine, said Cathleen Duff, president at Cushing & Color. Each line represents a particular print engine and a bar represents how much time a print engine requires to finish that job.