Get Smart

Think about the word “smart.” It’s a relative term, right? In the 90s, the graphic arts and publishing industries began imploring professionals to “get smarter”. Buy smarter, measure smarter, print smarter... the list went on and on, for years. Were we to be convinced that we weren’t doing our jobs as intelligently as we could, and should, have; all along?

Of course manufacturers didn’t mean to offend. They were just stating the facts of their developments: use this, and your process or operation will benefit.

Lately, though, we’re lifting our feet up off the ground with a bit more alacrity. There’s an uplifting air of enthusiasm beginning to while its way in and around the industry – especially among the forward thinking, digital progressives who are finding infinite, interactive, exciting opportunity in the next era of digital communications.

Enfocus is one of those companies, and over the next year you’ll hear and read real-life stories of our customers doing things akin to what our elders might have thought was sci-fi just a decade ago.

Enfocus’ concentration is now on Smart Automation and Smart Preflight and Correction, the critical next-generation cornerstones of our rising star in automation, Switch; and the Enfocus flagship solution that keeps re-inventing itself for the better while continuing to solve some of our industry’s major file preparation problems: PitStop.

Enfocus takes the intelligence requirement off you, your colleagues (and your kids, for that matter), and builds it – a lot of it -- into the products themselves.

Smart Automation and Smart Preflight are Switch and PitStop grown-up: independent premedia applications that get up in the morning and go to work by themselves. They’ll even stay up all night if you want them to.

When you look at what smart products such as these are doing for operations, you’ll understand the production-level benefits of using them.

Here’s a little peek at how it could happen with your new, smart “employee”, Switch:

Switch prioritizes a day’s work the way you’ve taught it to, combined – if you allow it, with its own assessments of how to cost- and time- effectively move jobs through premedia/prepress. Overnight, it may have been sorting files by name or condition, for example.

For instance, Switch may have prepared a Smart Preflight job in concert with Enfocus PitStop. When you and your staff come in at the start of your workday, you’ll find your choice of reports and notifications of status on different jobs. Customer service representatives might receive email status (e.g., the Acme job is done, or perhaps an email from the CSR has gone out to the client automatically, saying the job is complete).

Perhaps you are incentivizing customers by giving discounts for those whose provided files go through the system with limited, or no, problems. Switch will automatically note the job ticket and any related accounting records simultaneously – again with notifications sent internally and/or externally, as desired.

As you will see, when we show you on our Enfocus Crossroads site and blog (www.crossroads-world.com) - a dedicated portal for Switch customers and users - and share through the new Enfocus site itself, as well as other places; the possibilities for Smart Automation are infinite. We have customers writing all types of new scripts (or “flows”) to “make “ Switch do a lot of highly customized work in areas we never thought of. You’ll see that our Switch is a smart employee who keeps getting promoted, but amazingly, costs his/her bosses (our customers) less; the smarter he/she gets and the more sophisticated the work!

In our world, being Smart is the only way to be.