Prepress

Ricoh delivers productivity and performance benefits through an enhanced TotalFlow portfolio

Wednesday 17. April 2013 - Ricoh Europe announces a series of additions to strengthen its expanding TotalFlow portfolio of workflow solutions for the cut sheet production printing market.

It is enhancing existing print management and makeready solutions with the introduction of TotalFlow Production Manager, TotalFlow Print Manager and TotalFlow Prep. Also, the addition of TotalFlow Path, a new integration and automation software, ideal for mid-sized inplant/CRD and commercial printers, enables different applications to communicate smoothly in a single end-to-end workflow.
TotalFlow Production Manager is a new print workflow management tool for cut sheet production printing environments. It provides advanced capabilities to manage print jobs and up to ten printers from a single interface. With TotalFlow Production Manager, PostScript and PCL can be automatically transformed to PDF. It also allows users to build a customised, automated workflow (through a highly intuitive, drag and drop Graphical User Interface). Furthermore, with optional colour management integration and advanced preflight integration via third-party applications, such as Enfocus PitStop, it is ideal for commercial printing and larger CRD environments.
“With this critical addition to the TotalFlow platform, companies will also benefit from the ability to automate job scheduling based on printer capabilities and printer availability as well as dynamic media catalogue discovery and device synchronisation,” says Benoit Chatelard, Ricoh’s General Manager Solutions, Production Printing Group, EMEA. “The overall result is that printer utilisation is optimised and cost and turnaround times are reduced for a broad range of operations, for commercial printers in particular. TotalFlow Production Manager is the cutsheet alternative to our Ricoh Process Director that manages the workflow of hundreds of continuous feed print infrastructures across the industry.”
Ricoh is also announcing enhancements to its existing print management and makeready products – Ricoh TotalFlow PM and Ricoh TotalFlowMR – to provide a fully integrated, software suite that will manage cut sheet operations, from end to end. TotalFlow Print Manager, the successor to TotalFlow PM, is a print/output management software solution which provides a single point of control for managing mixed jobs and multiple production systems. It ensures fast and efficient delivery of jobs, with job ticketing attributes pre-programmed into production. It can
also look ahead to jobs already queued for production so that rush or other specialised jobs can be managed accordingly. New features in the entry level TotalFlow Print Manager include
enhanced scheduling, error recovery, and reporting; a new web submission tool; notifications; and support for up to five printers. It is ideal for print room and CRDs.
TotalFlow Prep, the successor to TotalFlow MR, is a ready-to-use document imposition, composition, editing and ticketing tool designed to integrate with the other TotalFlow products. Ideal for CRDs, it prepares jobs for production, enabling late stage editing, preflight editing and combining several files into one. It also automates the image editing of scanned documents for a crisp output with flexible tab settings to create a professional finish. New media management features also make the management of multiple substrates quicker and easier.
TotalFlow Path is a new Ricoh software platform that intelligently connects multiple production printing solutions, taking Ricoh’s workflow integration to a new level of connectivity. Print operations seeking to integrate islands of technology across their environment can use TotalFlow Path to automate and connect different processes and products from a variety of different vendors.
“Our goal is to make it easier for our print production partners to work smarter,” explains Benoit Chatelard, Ricoh’s General Manager Solutions, Production Printing Group, EMEA: “TotalFlow Path is easy to use and implement and will ensure increased productivity and reduced human error by automating repetitive tasks. It also makes it easy to incorporate existing software from Ricoh and third parties to make the most of existing investments in the workflow.”
TotalFlow Path offers a simple, structured approach to connecting multiple workflow components. At launch, preconfigured connections include to EFI Fiery, PTI Marcom Central, PTI FusionPro and Objectif Lune PlanetPress.
TotalFlow Path is designed specifically for digital print production and doesn’t require extensive IT or programming skills to integrate software and devices into an efficient operation that will meet today’s challenging market realities. It minimises the need for manual re-keying throughout the job workflow and customises workflow processes to each unique environment. Job tracking is available throughout the workflow process, while automated makeready can be incorporated through integration with TotalFlow Prep.
Chatelard concludes, “Individually, these affordable solutions offer many productivity benefits, but collectively they enable operations of all sizes to make significant improvements to job scheduling, throughput, business performance and, ultimately, profitability.”