Automation is the key to growth, scalability, and improved print profits—but you knew that already.
It’s what practically every vendor of every automation solution is telling you. And those vendors aren’t wrong—automation really is the key. It’s just that so many of the solutions out there are incomplete or don’t keep their promises, using the term ‘automation’ as a catch all. They often don’t fit together well, if at all, and only solves one (perhaps overlapping) piece of the puzzle.
There is one pairing of products that covers the entire print production spectrum with advanced integration and automation that can deliver on the automation process. Print businesses that integrate Avanti Slingshot™ Print MIS, a leading modern print MIS, with RICOH ProcessDirector™, a scalable end-to-end production print workflow management solution, unlock an automation solution that is more than the sum of its parts.
Integrating these two powerful print systems can streamline print workflows, reduce costs, and improve productivity throughout numerous facets of your print business.
Here’s how.
Get to Know Both Systems
Later in this post, we’ll show you how Avanti Slingshot (Slingshot) and RICOH ProcessDirector (ProcessDirector) can integrate, delivering even more significant synergistic benefits for your business. But these are wide-ranging and complex software platforms, and understanding each solution can take some explaining. So before diving into how Slingshot and ProcessDirector are better together, here is a brief overview of these powerful software systems and what they can do for your workflow automation.
Avanti Slingshot Print MIS
Avanti Slingshot is an award-winning print MIS and print workflow management solution built by Avanti Systems, a Ricoh company. It helps commercial printers, in-plant printers, print and mail solutions, and large format printers manage, integrate, and visualize all aspects of their print workflows — estimating, order management, billing, web-to-print (W2P), , inventory management, accounting, job status visibility, and more are all a part of the Avanti Slingshot experience.
This JDF-certified print management software platform handles multiple lines of business, offering a wide range of core and add-on modules. It provides a customized, tailored, fully integrated solution that supports the needs of a flexible business’s workflow rather than the other way around.
Customers are routinely impressed by the degree to which Slingshot transforms their capacity, reduces manual touchpoints, and saves multiple hours every single week.
RICOH ProcessDirector
RICOH ProcessDirector is a highly scalable end-to-end production print workflow management software solution. Whereas Slingshot focuses on print information management, it delivers an entire business workflow management platform,
ProcessDirector enables print businesses to satisfy reporting requirements; users can generate audit trails all the way down to the level of an individual piece of communications. Mailing costs can also be optimized by streamlining mail handling, pooling documents, pre-sorting mail and maximizing postal discounts.
ProcessDirector enables teams to achieve 100% document management and output integrity. Through greater automation and fewer manual touchpoints, RPD reduces errors and costs, streamlines production, and improves output and profitability while adhering to compliance standards such as GDPR and HIPAA
The most significant distinctions between the two systems are:
- ProcessDirector’s comprehensive data collection capabilities give you unprecedented and actionable data visibility.
- Slingshot’s job estimating and job entry capabilities greatly improve the accuracy of both estimates and jobs, improving efficiency and growing profits.
While there is some overlap between the two systems, each has unique capabilities. When you combine the two solutions, you realize the greatest process and efficiency gains.
As a single system, they’re impressive with a proven, measurable return on investment (ROI). Together they’re even better.
Integrating Avanti Slingshot and RICOH ProcessDirector
Integrating Slingshot and ProcessDirector generates numerous benefits. Pairing ProcessDirector’s superior data collection capabilities with the end-to-end control and visibility of Slingshot’s print MIS merges your data-driven decision-making with new automation, removing expensive bottlenecks like manual entry, and eliminating the need requirement? to jump between solutions.
This combination speeds up the onboarding, job management, prepress, production and output processes, thereby optimizing your print production workflow and keeping your machines at full capacity.
Together, the systems communicate with each other, so you have consistent, accurate data and visibility across your production workflow.
Current RICOH ProcessDirector Users
If you’re already using RICOH ProcessDirector, adding Avanti Slingshot gives you greater visibility into business data and costs. Slingshot provides staff and customers an additional method for managing jobs. Ingesting those jobs into ProcessDirector can be seamless using rules-based automation.
Avanti Slingshot can serve as your order and reorder management platform, feeding job details directly to your production automation system (ProcessDirector). When integrated into your W2P system, Slingshot eliminates manual entry, enabling your operation to significantly reduce costly errors and human bottlenecks.
With these two systems working in tandem, you’ll gain a level of automation that finally enables you to scale your volume and its modular infrastructure allows you to grow over time. It’s impossible for human workers to input and shepherd hundreds of jobs every day manually, but with Slingshot and ProcessDirector, it’s already a reality for many customers.
Current Avanti Slingshot Users
Likewise, if you’re already using Avanti Slingshot, adding RICOH ProcessDirector adds powerful data collection, infusing Avanti with real-time access to job status, actual production data (including costs for labor and materials), and real inventory levels to enable further automation (such as automatic reordering at real trigger points, not by educated guess).
Together, the two systems generate a single integrated source of truth, harmonizing the data that both applications collect individually.
Learn more about this synergistic solution: download our eBook, Better Together: Avanti Slingshot and Ricoh ProcessDirector.
RICOH ProcessDirector + Avanti Slingshot: Explore the Synergy
How does all this happen, technically speaking? Both applications use industry standard JDF and JMF data exchange formats. These shared standards make it possible to integrate these two systems and enable vendor-agnostic operation with any other hardware or system.
The result is a synergistic, integrated system that gives you a powerful single source of truth that touches nearly every component of your print business, adding transformative automation and deep visibility all along the way.
We want to help you explore the synergy between these two powerful systems, and that starts with a free workflow evaluation. Reach out today to see what’s possible with Avanti Slingshot + RICOH ProcessDirector for superior print business workflow management.
