What the EFI-FedEx Office Workflow Partnership Really Means for Printing Efficiency and Profitability
MyPRINTResource interviewed both parties in the wake of last week’s technology news, and here’s what they had to say about faster job creation.
When FedEx Office announced last week how it is optimizing its commercial print production with customized software technology from EFI, we were curious to learn more. Exactly how has FedEx Office “created a faster, cost-effective and streamlined way to deliver professional print services using EFI’s industry-leading productivity software,” as the firm’s official news release stated on July 14?
To get some detailed answers, we picked up the phone and called our good friend and workflow pioneer Udi Arieli at EFI. “Oh, you should also talk to FedEx Office, too,” he said, providing phone numbers for Aimee DiCicco, senior VP of sales, and Mike Preston, VP of network planning and operations. Preston designed and runs FedEx Office’s Network Fulfillment Center (NFC), which processes and routes all print projects.
The EFI software system directs large or complex print jobs to FedEx Office’s 17 Centralized Production Centers (CPCs). Team members at the NFC can now quickly view and assess the print production volume within the network, and easily direct print jobs to more than 100 color and monochrome digital presses across the country at its CPC plants. The network of plants has been in place for more than 10 years, Preston noted, and the RFP (request for proposal) went out five years ago or so to better synchronize operations. “EFI’s end-to-end solution was the best fit,” Preston recalled, and the build-out commenced.
EFI’s team used modules of the firm's Productivity Suite to customize a solution for FedEx Office. “We had the concept,” the workflow guru explained, but Arieli and his team added the integrations used and optimized facets of the existing product. “Our goal was to automate as much as possible,” he explained, “using so-called ‘smart software’ with rules that can make a lot of decisions for you. We do not see this so much in the printing industry.”
He cited one example of bidirectional communications with other programs, which facilitates faster job creation: “When a job is created in one of FedEx Office’s retail centers, it is sent to the NFC. Pace [EFI’s integrated MIS] can create the job intelligently from the specifications, with very few touches; there may be some inspection and a few changes; a click here or there. With Fiery and Fiery Central, even the imposition is created automatically.” To better manage printed output, Fiery Central integrates multiple digital printers that use the Fiery RIP and servers (and other select printers) into a unified print production system that uses common prepress tools and communicates with business management systems.
The workflow also is based on TGO -- the Theory of Global Optimization -- that Arieli and his team at EFI developed.
How the Total Workflow Flows
EFI’s Arieli breaks down the FedEx Office customized workflow into eight steps, stressing that the NFC dashboard is web-interfaced:
- A print job/order comes in and is sent to EFI Pace, where validation is quick and semi-automated.
- The job is then sent to PrintFlow for dynamic scheduling to determine which jobs will run on which print engines at which CPC and when.
- Fiery Central takes the schedule and creates a job ticket, with instructions, that feeds the Fiery servers – with no employee intervention required.
- Pace and Fiery Central give commands to take content and move it with the ticket to the chosen engine at the right time.
- Fiery reports status back to Pace and PrintFlow in real time.
- PrintFlow takes all the data, including new jobs and status, back from Fiery and continues scheduling and optimizing nonstop, automatically, 24/7 If necessary. It also has the ability to adjust schedules when paper jams or a given press goes down, for example.
- Fiery returns paper consumption, clicks, run times, and other machine details back to Pace.
- Pace captures all data for future analysis and reporting.
Tweaking and Fine Tuning
“It took about three years to enhance and finalize it,” Preston shared. The improved EFI system, which has been running live for more than 24 months, has increased production efficiency by more than 15 percent, FedEx Office reported. Final implementation was completed this past mid-spring, he added.
FedEx Office has been running "marketing and advertising promotional print jobs through the system for large and mid-size clients,” DiCicco said. “We’ve extremely reduced [our] timeframes,” she reported, pointing out the additional benefits of more flexibility and repeatable scale and color. “Our network technology enables us to say ‘yes’ to our clients.”
To illustrate the technology’s potential, DiCicco mentioned the experience of one particular customer: a large retailer with thousands of locations nationwide. “They had an event planned three months in advance with a marketing agency and a typical printer with a couple of locations,” she related. Three days before the shipping date this past winter, “there were significant weather patterns. It wasn’t going to happen.
“We utilized our local and ground services in the market and were able to turn around the job less than three days after we received the files,” she continued. “We took the entire campaign, using our network and FedEx’s transportation modes, and produced [the components] closest to the point of need, with color consistency and quality.”
Advanced automation yields labor savings on both sides. One of the new system’s biggest expediting factors, she noted, is that FedEx Office clients do not need people to manage files internally. This alone can cut delivery times in half or even more, “from concept and file receipt to delivery,” according to DiCicco.
When I pressed FedEx Office for the actual number of presses in its fleet, DiCicco and Preston would only verify that they mostly are digital devices and lined up, end to end, would fill 22 wide-body Boeing 777 airplanes, each of which can seat up to 450 passengers. That’s a lot of digital “iron.” (While he would not reveal its preferred digital press vendor, Preston did share that FedExOffice may soon be upgrading and presently is reviewing new proposals from OEMs.)
This development with FedEx Office marks an ongoing evolution that started three decades ago, Arieli believes, marking “the first time that we have combined business and production processes, such as estimating and job planning, into one workflow,” he said excitedly. “This has been my dream since 2000!”
And why is FedEx Office talking now, after years of silence? “We were not ready to talk,” DiCicco explained bluntly, until now. “Quality is foundational to everything we do," she said, " and that includes the way we communicate. It is what our customers expect. We now have a fully implemented solution, so now it’s time to talk about it.”
Added Preston, "The collaboration between FedEx Office and EFI produced a solution that exceeds expectations and improves efficiencies for print decision makers.”
The bottom line, according to Arieli, is that “this workflow is a game-changer in our industry, and [it’s] not just for large companies. It is a disruptive technology that can totally change how you run and manage a [printing] company. We all know how difficult it can be to stay profitable today. This product can help our industry to do better, to be more efficient, and to make more money because the information is all right there, not [scattered] in 20 different places.”
Readers will recall that Federal Express purchased Kinko’s in 2004 for $2.4 billion. (The Kinko’s name was dropped four years later as part of FedEx Office’s branding.)
www.efi.com/products/productivity-software/productivity-suite
These animated, fun videos explain the EFI Automated Workflow experience.
A Pair of Laughing Stocks?
Besides being highly intelligent men with extremely innovative ideas, what else do FedEx founder Fred Smith and EFI’s Udi Arieli have in common? Well, for one, peers thought they both were impractically foolish early in their careers.
Legend has it that Smith failed a term paper as an undergrad at Yale University some 50 years ago because his economics professor thought his idea for an overnight delivery service was ludicrous. The truth, however, was not quite so harsh. Still, the Ivy League instructor was not impressed, telling the student, “The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a ‘C,’ the idea must be feasible,” according to an Entrepreneur magazine report.
“Several years later, through a combination of innovative thinking, unbridled charisma and sheer determination, Smith would use this ‘interesting but unfeasible’ concept to found the world's first overnight delivery company and change the transportation industry forever,” the article continued.
In much the same way, Arieli, now senior director of high-end market business development at EFI, was ridiculed 20 years earlier in the mid-1980s for creating the Theory of Global Optimization (TGO) that many companies have since adopted -- and for creating the dynamic, real-time intelligent scheduling PrintFlow that many people did not believe could work. Keep in mind that 30 years ago, MIS software was foreign in the printing industry. "Everything was mainly manual in those days." the innovator said, recalling how he had to educate the industry and give many lectures on these subjects. Even today, he said, with it being more mainstream, many printing firms still do not understand what modern MIS is or can be. "We need to educate the industry about automation, smart software, optimization, etc.," Arieli noted.
“From 1985 until about 2002, I was pretty much the laughing stock of the industry,” Arieli recalled, only half joking. “A lot of people thought I was a crackpot! Slowly over the years, more and more people, companies, consultants , media, and competitors realized that TGO and PrintFlow [at the time] were important and could make a huge difference. Many time felt I was Don Quixote fighting the wind mills. Against all odds, I did not stop fighting, educating until today. Over the years I was less and less ridiculed."
Who’s laughing now?
