Do You Know Your Web to Print Workflows?
What comes to mind when you see the phrase “web to print workflows”? It might be the steps a client takes to personalize and proof a variable data print (VDP) item. Or you might think of the flow of order information from the client’s storefront to your production team’s view.
Web to print workflows include those examples and much more. This can make it challenging to fully conceptualize what web to print “does” because web to print software touches so many parts of the print providers business.
This ambiguity due to the holistic nature of web to print can also muddy the waters when it comes to implementation, strategy development, and team coordination. Think about the variety of departments and types of personnel that could be interacting with your web to print solution.
From the client, to the client’s end users, to your warehouse staff, to the sales team, and even possibly outside vendors. Building a shared understanding of the scope and essential workflows of your web to print solution with your team is essential to take full advantage of the solution’s potential. That potential being: eliminating equipment downtime, increasing production efficiency, maintaining customer satisfaction, and sharpening your competitive edge.
Workflows for You, Workflows for Your Customer
It can be useful to begin breaking down web to print workflows by first drawing a distinction between the “client-side” and the “producer-side” of the solution. Web to print is fundamentally a system for streamlining, simplifying and facilitating the connection the producer and the customer. For B2B web to print in particular, there are many points of connection that your solution enables and the scope extends far beyond simply placing print orders.
Thinking of web to print two halves of a whole makes it easier to define the workflows. Some functions and processes of your solution will take place entirely on the client-side storefront. Some will take place entirely on the producer-side management portal. For simplicity’s sake, we can refer to these two halves as the “front-end” and the “back-end.”
Some examples of workflows on the front-end include approval workflows, product personalization, and digital asset management. When the customer clicks on an upload print product they are taken through a specific workflow (upload, specify, preview, checkout). When they click on an inventoried promo product on the other hand, they might simply be taken right to the cart. Both products live on the storefront and are browsed and accessed as part of a seamless shopping experience. But behind the scenes, different workflows facilitate their unique production and fulfillment needs.
Then there are the broad category of what we can call “product workflows.” These are the bread and butter functions of web to print and they define the specialized steps that take place for a product to go from “order placed” to ready-to-ship. Unlike the previously mentioned workflow types, product workflows involve the front-end and the back-end and can be thought of as the essential “glue” that bridges the gap.
With that, let’s get into specifics and define the essential workflows of web to print software.
Glossary of Web to Print Workflows
Variable Data Print
Often referred to personalized print or versioned print, this kind of product workflows is what web to print was fundamentally created to solve for. The initial appeal of web to print was the idea of replacing the slow and inefficient process of proofing personalized print via direct producer and client interaction with a self-service process through an online portal.
Typically it involves the producer setting up for the client a specialized product template that the end user can add data to in order to personalize the template. The key here is that the pre-approved template allows the client and producer a measure of control over the final proof while still giving the end user agency to customize the piece and do so without manual assistance.
Upload Print
This refers to print that has the end user uploading artwork to be included in the print piece in an ad hoc fashion. This has a lot in common with the typical variable data print workflow in that these jobs are custom print by definition and unique to each order.
Unlike VDP though, such as a business card, upload print requires the user to utilize an uploading workflow on their end that may include processes such as automatic cropping, resolution checks, and other forms of prepress automated services.
Sometimes this can also refer to content that isn’t uploaded uniquely for each order but is selected from a pre-approved online library of files. Web to print platforms that include robust digital asset management modules can make this particularly convenient for the client who wants to give their users options for what images to use without giving them the freedom to upload whatever they want.
Static Print
Static print is anything that falls outside of the ad hoc and custom print definitions. In other words, this is print that has a lot in common with non-print from the customer experience perspective. They hit Add to Cart and are ready to checkout.
From the producers end, static print can either be printed on-demand or pulled from inventory. This means that this is a unique category from the back-end perspective in that it can either flow from the front-end straight into the fulfillment workflow or it can go to a production workflow depending on how the product is set up and whether or not their is inventory on-hand.
Direct Mail Workflows
Direct mail is often combined with personalized print but when talking specifically about direct mail workflows, we are referring to the process of preparing an order to go to a list of contacts. This might include list uploads, list purchasing, selecting from a pre-approved set of contact lists, automatic processes for deduplication and address verification, and more.
Non-Print Workflows
Non print is the miscellaneous category for everything a marketing solutions provider might offer through a web to print portal that isn’t printed. Often, this means promotional products such as hats and lanyards. It can also include items that come with new employer kits such as notebooks and pens.
These product workflows can often be as simple as the user clicking Add to Cart and the producer pulling product from inventory. But this can also extend to the capabilities of the solution to connect outside vendors and drop shippers.
Apparel Workflows
Apparel technically falls under the non-print category but it is worth mentioning in it’s own section because it is the most common example of what I call a configured product workflow.
Configured products, also sometimes known as product variants, are non-print products that give the user options to choose from in order to determine exactly what SKU this order will be for.
In a way this makes configured products more similar to personalized print in that the user will need to take steps between selecting the item and adding the item to the cart.
For example, think of a t-shirt on the storefront that has a variety of possible combinations of sizes and colors. The configuration workflows is whatever interface process the user goes through to select their variants and the system’s process for matching those selections with the right SKUs.
Kit Workflows
A product kit is a combination of one or more products into a single cart item that can be ordered together.
The benefit of offering product kits for your client’s users is that it can streamline the process of selecting products to order when the client has certain common use-cases that they know will reoccur frequently.
The trick with kits is that they will often have a combination of products with completely different workflows in the same grouping. A well designed kitting product workflow needs to take into consideration the user experience to guide the user smoothly from product selection to checkout.
Approval Workflows
Many web to print solutions use approval workflows to give the client more control and certainty when managing their marketing distribution. It’s one thing to use pre-approved templates and user limits as guide rails for protecting brand compliance and budgets. But a robust approvals system takes it a step further and allows clients to design a thorough set of workflows for making sure the right people in their organization will see the right orders and give a manual stamp of approval before letting it go through.
Inventory Management Workflows
Inventory management is a huge part of web to print solutions and can include any number of workflows for improving your warehouse efficiency, accuracy, and speed.
This can mean anything from how your web to print system handles backordered products to systems for alerting people in your organization when certain products need to be purchased to restock. Some solutions have features like forecasting that use advanced data calculations to read the velocity of inventory usage and give you predictions about when you’ll need to restock.
The Bigger Picture: You and Your Web to Print Workflows
In the age of automation and holistic marketing solutions, web to print has become more than print order workflows. The goal when integrating web to print into your operations should be to make every aspect of ordering, distributing, and managing their marketing catalog as smooth as possible.
What workflows that involves will depend on your business and what you want to focus on. Some of the workflows that were defined above might not apply to the type of work you typically do and some solutions will have workflows that weren’t covered. But the idea with this breakdown is to stress the importance of gaining a deeper understanding of what your solution is capable of and how each component plays a role in the greater goal of efficiency and automation.
