Get Ready Now for the All-Clear

Is your print shop ready for business openings in the coming weeks? Will you capture the potential volume surge, and will your operation be able to handle it?

Printers and in-plants must prepare for the business world’s reopening. There are several likely challenges that printing operations will face in the coming weeks as businesses begin to restart:

• Customers will want effective, targeted direct marketing materials to announce openings and to drive business.
• No one knows precisely when or how restarting the economy will occur, but decisions will likely happen at the last minute.
• Expect high volumes of low-complexity, fast-turnaround, short-run work.
• Printers probably aren’t considering new investments or implementations before this occurs.

Printing operations, however, have time to prepare now.

Industry vendors are stepping up to help print professionals get ready for a re-start. One of them, Electronics For Imaging (EFI), has developed free webinars on variable-data printing and digital print automation to help printing companies and in-plants address upcoming challenges.

EFI’s free FreeForm Create application can help create targeted direct marketing materials,

A Wednesday, May 6 session on personalized direct marketing will showcase creating targeted direct marketing materials using EFI’s free FreeForm Create application. Attendees will learn how to personalize static PDF files with variable text and graphics. Plus, they will discover how designers, or even end-customers, can create and submit personalized jobs. The session will also detail how users can modify new, free templates professionally designed for post-crisis openings. Even if they have never done variable data before, Fiery users will see how they can offer VDP print with no investment and very little training.

EFI is hosting a free webinar, “Business improvement ROI through achievable workflow automation.”

EFI also has a free webinar on Wednesday, May 13, on “Business improvement ROI through achievable workflow automation.” When the world restarts, printers, and in-plants will print a lot of banners, flyers, POS signage, floor stickers, disposable menus, and so forth. Most jobs are going to be reasonably straightforward to produce but will primarily be new jobs rather than reorders. Thus, these jobs will require preflighting, impositioning, and other prepress work. This session will focus on tools to automate this anticipated job mix. The session covers:

• Using Fiery JobFlow software to automate expected job types, and to take immediate advantage of pre-configured workflows
• Improving efficiency by automating frequent jobs organically. 
• Automatic job preflighting, identification and processing.

The session is designed to show how easy it is for anyone who understands prepress to automate it, and attendees with get a free, fully-functional 90-day trial of Fiery JobFlow software.

EFI is hosting a makeready automation session that will show how to automatically layout and add correct finishing barcodes to fully-automate workflows to save up to 70% of setup time.

The last free webinar, on Wednesday, May 20, will cover makeready automation from prepress to postpress. It is a useful topic especially when you consider that the first thing many printing businesses and in-plants will produce as this crisis ends are postcards of varying sizes. Print shops with near-line automated finishers will undoubtedly be using them. This webinar will show how to automatically layout and add correct finishing barcodes to fully-automate workflows to save up to 70% of setup time.

This program is a good way to use your time to get ready for the new world. You can visit webinar.efi.com/WOFMay20 to learn more and register for the webinars. EFI is also offering attendees of all three webinars a 75% discount toward the $250 program cost of its Fiery Professional Certification program.