Ricoh Americas Corporation today announced its 2014 MUST SEE ‘EM award-winning RICOH TotalFlow BatchBuilder.
This new, industry-first software solution simplifies and automates the batching and scheduling of short-run digital work for centralized job control. The vendor-neutral offering empowers users seeking better ways to meet production demands from high volumes of short-run and on demand jobs, while minimizing labor costs, increasing efficiency and throughput, and more effectively managing jobs.
As commercial printers, publishing printers, in-plants, franchise printers, and service bureaus grapple with these types of jobs, which typically require time-consuming hands-on management, they are faced with increasing costs in time and money. Commercial printers in particular often have multiple digital device installations from different vendors and need software that can pull jobs together from all of them. TotalFlow BatchBuilder software is the industry’s only standalone solution to these problems. It provides users with an open platform for disparate submission methods and scheduling based on pre-defined responses to job attributes. This approach streamlines job ticketing, scheduling, routing and finishing with an ultimate goal of increasing printers’ efficiency and revenues.
At Ricoh’s GRAPH EXPO #1931 booth, visitors can see TotalFlow BatchBuilder producing batches of bound books, cut -and-stack business cards, folded brochures, and more.
“The printing industry is experiencing a number of shifts and one of the most evident trends is increasing client demand for more short-run and on demand jobs. These types of jobs offer users new business opportunities, but also hinder how efficiently work gets done,” said John Fulena, director, professional services and solutions marketing, Ricoh Americas Corporation. “TotalFlow BatchBuilder addresses this difficulty by harnessing the information in jobs to automatically and intelligently group and produce similar jobs. With this solution, users can successfully capitalize on this industry shift, rather than be overwhelmed by it.”
TotalFlow BatchBuilder enables printers to:
- Streamline job ticketing, scheduling, routing and finishing by organizing incoming orders from multiple sources and batching jobs based on more than 100 customizable fields
- Automate job submission from MIS, web-to-print portals, homegrown platforms and prepress systems to TotalFlow BatchBuilder via XML or JDF
- Track volume of work based on criteria such as number of jobs, sheets or run time
- Manage orders and bring jobs back together after they have been split and printed in different batches for tracking and shipping purposes
- Manage batches by defining output device-specific criteria and routing batches manually, automatically or semi-automatically
- Control all jobs in their multi-vendor printing environment, including high-speed digital inkjet and cutsheet devices. The solution is hardware agnostic and designed to be flexible to meet the demands of the typical print environment. It can also assist with roll management of continuous feed devices.
- View all work based on job properties through an intuitive web-based GUI
- Open, view and download PDF files
- Set triggers with the Alerts feature, which permits operators to that send alerts for XML inconsistencies, input/output errors, batch errors and mapped network drive errors
For more information about RICOH TotalFlow BatchBuilder, view this new video or visit the Web site.
