Inkjet & Digital Printing
Ricoh empowers customers to increase efficiencies and minimize waste on short-run and on-demand print jobs
Wednesday 16. September 2015 - RICOH TotalFlow BatchBuilder adds barcodes and alerts for improved tracking and monitoring capabilities
Ricoh Americas Corporation today announced RICOH TotalFlow BatchBuilder, a new, enhanced version of its industry-first software solution that simplifies and automates the batching and scheduling of short-run digital work for centralized job control. The enhancements further address print service providers’ pain points around short-run and on-demand jobs through improved tracking and alert capabilities to increase efficiencies, improve costs and minimize waste.
Efficiently, effectively handling short-run and on-demand jobs can require time-consuming, hands-on management to avoid waste and missed deadlines. This can often be a proposition even more difficult for printers running installations with digital printers from multiple vendors to manage and monitor. The original RICOH TotalFlow BatchBuilder software was developed to help commercial printers, as well as publishing printers, in-plants, franchise printers and service bureaus, resolve these issues by simplifying and automating many of the steps in short-run digital production. Through a single web-based user interface, the software allows users to develop pre-defined rules for jobs helping to automate many of the manual steps and then batch like jobs together for simpler routing and finishing. This allows for increased job production resulting in improved revenues.
Capabilities new to RICOH TotalFlow BatchBuilder include:
The ability to add barcodes to batch tickets around shipping. This allows for status and location update tracking throughout the production process.
A new user interface for manually scanning barcodes.
A new dashboard with enhanced instant views of jobs being batched, enabling immediate status updates.
New alerts around due times for orders, mismatches for specific filter requirements, duplicate orders and low disk space, that can be seen on the dashboard or sent via email to ensure when problems happen, they are addressed immediately, helping ensure SLAs are met.
Already vendor agnostic, the software now has 3rd party integration of imposition capabilities.
“The desire for short-run and on-demand print jobs is increasing, especially in commercial publishing,” said John Fulena, Vice President, Production Printing Business Group, Ricoh Americas Corporation. “While these needs open up new revenue possibilities for printers, they also create efficiency and cost challenges that weren’t there before. We originally developed RICOH TotalFlow BatchBuilder to use job information to automatically and intelligently group and process similar jobs, thus helping users overcome these challenges. With this new version, we have streamlined the view, tracking and alert capabilities in order to further help printers ultimately improve efficiencies and even venture into new market opportunities.”
These enhancements continue Ricoh’s work to help its customers drive efficiencies and increase control in their output environments.