Prepress

Ricoh continues to help customers improve print operations with its newest TotalFlow enhancements

Friday 18. September 2015 - New RICOH TotalFlow Prep, RICOH TotalFlow Path, and RICOH TotalFlow Print Manager and Production Manager add capabilities

Ricoh Americas Corporation today announced enhancements to RICOH TotalFlow Prep, RICOH TotalFlow Path, and RICOH TotalFlow Print Manager and Production Manager, aimed to help customers increase workflow efficiency, decrease turnaround times and avoid errors. These enhancements make leveraging the software’s considerable power easier than ever before, with added features and, in the case of RICOH TotalFlow Prep, an all-new, intuitive interface.

With short-run, on-demand jobs on the rise, printers are taking on more jobs of smaller sizes, making it more difficult than ever before to keep efficiently processing their workload. Repetitive and/or focus-intensive prepress tasks, such as tab management and imposition, can become a major hurdle for printers working hard to keep up. That’s why RICOH TotalFlow Prep, RICOH TotalFlow Path, and RICOH TotalFlow Print Manager and Production Manager help take certain tasks out of overburdened printers’ hands, automating them to help improve overall quality of work – and speeding things along, so more work can be taken on.

These enhancements further Ricoh’s work to leverage its expertise – in the production print, software engineering, and workflow automation spaces – to help customers increase efficiency and quality throughout their operations.

Capabilities new to RICOH TotalFlow Prep include:

A completely new interface aimed at a vastly improved user experience. Jobs are visually represented within the interface, and adjustments are reflected in this preview, working to eliminate the need for multiple wasteful test prints to ensure accurate settings.
Imposition features that, in addition to employing a similar visual preview feature to help ensure rapid and confident sheet layout, include templates, so frequent job types become a snap to impose.
Simple, one-stop tab management that automatically inserts or converts tabs, even from multiple sources, into your document, leveraging clear visual representations so you can track your tabs throughout the print process.
Ticket-based templates that make returning to familiar job types quick and easy, including new support for exception pages that further reduces manual touch points.
User Code support to provide greater insight into how RICOH TotalFlow Prep is used, facilitating pattern recognition, workflow improvements, and chargeback programs.

RICOH TotalFlow Print Manager and Production Manager have added the following features:

PDF print drivers, which allow jobs to maintain PDF content and associated production print options much deeper into the production process, allowing late changes and redirection for when conditions demand last-minute tweaks.
User Code support to enable greater insight into costs and usage associated with operation.
Support for long paper, banner-style media used in conjunction with many Ricoh printers, simplifying use of these substrates without retraining.
GW subset stapling, which enables the submission of multiple copies of subset stapled jobs without requiring time-consuming, error-prone manual collation.
Specific to RICOH TotalFlow Production Manager, preflight server integration, allowing replaceable profiles to be executed on PDF job files and generating a full report, significantly reducing time and materials waste associated with improperly handled PDF files and automatically correcting many related errors.

Meanwhile, RICOH TotalFlow Path brings a renewed capability, in conjunction with other members of the suite, to provide a simple, smooth connection from Web-to-Print and MIS systems to production workflows.

“I cannot overstate how helpful workflow automation is in production print environments,” said John Fulena, Vice President, Production Printing Business Group, Ricoh Americas Corporation. “The ability to reduce a printer’s workload with intelligent, reliable task automation is key to not only increasing speed and efficiency, but it’s also a major step in helping to ensure work is done right. Manual touch points are a liability busy shops cannot afford. That’s why this software suite was first designed, and it’s exciting to see how we’ve enhanced it to help our customers flourish in the industry they serve.”