Workflow Integration Software

Aleyant Systems, an innovative leader in providing robust software services to the graphic communications industry at value-driven prices, and ErgoSoft, a supplier of intuitive, high fidelity digital printing solutions, announced a unique integration between Aleyant’s Pressero Automated Workflow Integrator (AWI) and ErgoSoft’s Automation. With this integration, once an order is received in Aleyant’s Pressero, the Automated Workflow Integrator pulls the job from Pressero, creates an ErgoSoft Automation file, and provides both the file and image files to the ErgoSoft RIP for processing, bypassing the RIP’s graphical user interface.

“We are continually looking for ways to streamline workflow for our customers,” said Robert Nute, Director of Business Development for ErgoSoft. “This integration does just that.  In fact, it consolidates four steps into three and in most cases, we estimate it will save between 10 and 20 minutes of labor for each job received.  In the web-to-print world, where shops are receiving large numbers of repeat jobs or customized orders, this level of efficiency can increase and expedite return on investment.”

Customer experience has shown that Automation can dramatically improve workflow.  Now, with integration of Pressero using the Automated Workflow Integrator, speeding up workflow and reducing costs just got much easier. Spoonflower, an ErgoSoft customer, provides an example of how adding automation with solutions such as Automated Workflow Integrator from Aleyant Systems can deliver real, measurable results.

“Implementing Automation has improved our workflow dramatically,” said Gart Davis, Co-Founder of Spoonflower. “Moving from setting up each job manually to being able to automate the entire process has probably netted us an 85 to 90% increase in efficiency.” Chad Graves, Spoonflower’s Web Developer and Digital Printing Specialist said, “When we first began to experiment with automation, one operator could perhaps handle 4 printers successfully without any downtime.  Now we are easily up to 8-10 printers per operator if things get smoking.” Both Davis and Graves commented,   “Without the ability to automate these jobs using Automation from ErgoSoft, the idea of our company being able to scale appropriately would be almost impossible.  It really allowed us to fully reach our projected goals for printing.”

Nute explains that when a customer places an order through a web to print storefront, a normal work process would include processing the order, collecting all of the job assets, opening the file in the RIP, pre-production and then printing the job. “With the new process,” he says, “when the order is received via a Pressero storefront, files are automatically processed (including scaling, orientation and more) and distributed as necessary to go directly to the RIP for printing. The production operator can spend more time focused on quality control and other more productive tasks.”

“We are pleased to be working with ErgoSoft on this integration project,” said Greg Salzman, Aleyant’s President, “and contributing to a more streamlined customer workflow.  Pressero and ErgoSoft’s solutions are both open systems and easy to work with from an integration perspective.”

Salzman points out that Pressero Automated Workflow Integrator runs on a desktop computer or server and can operate in Windows, Mac or Linux environments. Pressero AWI will automatically download jobs from Pressero’s storefront and redirect them to system or hot folders within the company’s LAN.  It has a flexible, configurable rules-based engine that allows the user to decide where to send each type of file, and can generate a device-specific control file that increases automation even further.