Web-to-Production – The Next Step of Print Workflow Automation

How do you connect your print production with the internet? And how do you make sure to have a reasonable margin when it comes to online orders? 

To keep up with growing customer demands while staying economically healthy, you need to automize your production wherever you can. There are many ways to do so (e.g. via REST API), and there are many shops and market places around. But connecting both seamlessly, the online shops, and your production workflows, can be quite difficult. You usually have a lot of different software and devices on your site. In addition, many online shop providers offer only limited possibilities when it comes to features and interfaces.  

Custom Create is different. 

Print Data Management Meets eCommerce 

 
It all starts with the unique front end. To motivate customers to choose you among all those print providers online, you need to  

• Make it simple: Your shop only needs the functions that are useful for your product. We create a shop that will meet your requirements. 
• Make it smart: Give your customer the tools to create / upload a design – or directly use templates to do so. Depending on what you produce, you need different types of files. With the right tools and settings, you can reduce iterations with the customer. 
• Make it fast: In the dynamic WebGPU based 3D online viewer (Custom Create Designer), your customer can directly see how the product will look like and purchase it on the spot.  

Having the print data and job management included, the design is sent to the right printer, color managed, ripped and with the right settings. To do this, ColorGATE’s Productionserver is built in and directly connected with the shop on one side and your production equipment on the other side. Productionserver is taking care of print data and color management and driving the devices (check out the devices we support). If you want, you can also include optional features, that can help you manage your production even better and more economically (check out the available modules here).  

Easy Integration, Administration and Reporting for Your Workflow 

With REST API or JDF, Custom Create can be integrated in basically every digital printing workflow.  

In the Magento-based back end you also find many reporting and administrating features:  

• Easy-to-use inventory & customer management 
• Automated approval workflows  
• Management of access rights & user groups 
• Price calculation dependent on product configuration 
• REST API and JDF/XML integration
• Analyses and reports of key figures 
• Connection to social media, payment, and logistic providers
• Multi shop/store opportunity (scalability)  

Print-on-demand, mass customization, batch size one and web-to-production are among the highest growing markets in digital printing (source). Contact us if you want to be ahead of the game!