Integrated Software Solution for print
Standard integrated software solutions like PrintVis and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central are truly integrated because there is one system that covers all administrative processes in a single database. If the customer provides new shipping addresses it can be entered into all departments at once, making it instantly available to the entire company! It‘s that simple for all data – including vital statistics and closing fiscal periods. All of this without the errors so commonly encountered when entering data more than once.
Print companies vary greatly in what they produce and how they produce it, and integrations with 3rd-party software are commonly required to fulfill some specific task that is unique to one company’s operative needs. PrintVis has successful integrations with many of these, including 3rd-party prepress systems, packaging-specific systems, label, paper vendor, web-shop, shipping and payment systems, and of course JDF/JMF software – the print industry standard – where we have been on the CIP4 board for over a decade.
“When the core platform is Microsoft based you get integration to other Microsoft products. The Microsoft Office suite and Outlook become an extension of your Print MIS system. For example, you can write reports using the Office suite and then bring them back into PrintVis. By utilizing the tools your employees are already familiar with (e.g. Microsoft Word), you can make adoption easier and reduce training because you’re using tools your team is already familiar with.”
Jennifer Matt, WhatTheyThink.com
Workflow Integration
When we speak of workflow integration we are referring to the merging of functionalities from different software solutions into a unified solution, resulting in valuable communication and data exchange between those integrated software solutions – and sometimes their respective machinery.
In years past multiple software solutions were used for various needs in your business; each with its own interface (usually requiring training) and database. Each department would work “internally” and communication between the groups usually involved paperwork. This also led to a tremendous amount of duplicate data entry – and wasted time.
For example, customer or supplier data is needed for your estimating department, your shipping department, your billing department, not to mention marketing and sales. Closing financial periods usually meant many hours of manual work, painstakingly gathering data to balance the books.
But these disparate interfaces are typically maintained, each by its own supplier – without an across-the-board standard. So – even a small software upgrade in one could necessitate redevelopment of all interfaces – causing problems with hardware and/or operation system compatibility. Having your business hamstrung by such issues was a regular expectation.
Web-to-Print Integration
PrintVis comes with its own B2B customer front-end, and also can integrate to most any Web Shop or Web-to-Print solution. PrintVis web integration even allows you to have an individual web application for each customer, designed differently but using the same core.
AGFA Apogee X Integration
Taking a leap into creating some out-of-the-box JDF integration, PrintVis now ships with the first of several predefined levels of integration (“packages”) for communication between PrintVis and AGFA prepress software. Each of these levels will provide documented examples for the required setup of jobs and their individual data flows.
Well-structured and documented, you can now simply install and run a ‘package’ to set up your entire initial communication between PrintVis and AGFA Apogee Prepress 10.x and 11.x, where standard workflows are predefined by their product type.
The AGFA Apogee X Integration Package includes outbound information from PrintVis to AGFA, as well as actual responses and basic job costing information flowing back to PrintVis from AGFA (referred to as Level 1 and Level 3 integration).
In order to packet such a complex integration as JDF/JMF, quite a few ‘standards’ have been set, but rest assured that you are still fully able to enhance your setup.
So – when you’re ready to start your JDF integration between PrintVis and AGFA, please do not hesitate to make use of this great new package that will get it all set up properly.
Book a personalized demo now to see how PrintVis can optimize your business.