Futureproof Your Workflow: Batch Management
By Erwin Busselot, Business Innovations & Solutions Director, Ricoh Graphic Communications, Ricoh Europe
One of the best practices of high performing printing operations is to lever the power of building batches to keep presses running with as few interruptions as possible.
While many printers are familiar with the idea of joining small jobs together to create longer print runs, batching brings intelligence, precision, and automation to the process. It is different from concatenation, which printers may use to stack files into a single print run.
Batching rules can be built and managed based on job attributes to optimise production to meet service level agreements (SLAs), production demands, or unique processing based on the client’s requirements.
Batches are groups of jobs that share common elements that allow them to be processed and printed together. Jobs might share a common colour profile, paper, or finishing path but arrive from a variety of applications and network locations on different schedules. Building batch queues to hold, then release files when the assigned criteria are met, streamlines production, and increases efficiency.
Offset printers have used these techniques for decades. They often take jobs from multiple clients and use nesting or ganging applications to increase print capacity. Labels, hang tags, and even business cards can share a common sheet for printing and then be separated based on their finishing requirements. Applying similar techniques to business, transaction, direct mail, and other types of printing helps to eliminate the hands-on efforts to manage the growing number of short run jobs – a constant challenge for many printers.
To get started:
- Look at job data to identify the common job types you manage.
- Look at physical job elements, like the paper and finishing, but then look at more granular elements.
- Consider the colour profiles and ink levels.
Batches should have similar ink profiles, so keep graphically rich brochures separate from files with fewer graphic elements like invoices. Keep dark colour profile work separate from lighter profiles.
A best practice is to use the variations in the print applications to develop job queues to automate capturing inbound jobs and routing them.
While many print operations use hot folders to manage jobs, that basic form of automation does not have the software intelligence for batching. If there are both sheetfed and continuous devices, moving jobs between them takes careful planning.
RICOH TotalFlow BatchBuilder is a purpose-built solution that supports both sheetfed and continuous feed devices that fulfil short and longer run requirements. It can help streamline the management of diverse print work and eliminate the need to rekey job information.
No matter how you get started, batching belongs in your printing operation. Batching helps to reduce paper waste that occurs as jobs start up and increase uptime for print devices by levering standard setups. Whether you acquire a batching solution or do it yourself, this is a best practice for your print business.
Be sure to check out our eBooks and webinar recordings for both Print Service Providers and print rooms. They’ll provide information about each of the print production stages and can be found on our regularly updated Ricoh Insights (https://www.ricoh-europe.com/insights) page.
For further information, please visit www.ricoh-europe.com
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