One-Stop Shopping

Lately, Tempting customers with the powerful phrase “buy one, get one free” isn’t only a strategy used to get shoppers to fill their carts. As creative and marketing solutions lengthen the list of print providers’ expected offerings, adding value is invaluable—no matter where one stands in the supply chain. In turn, the increasing demand for services means more automation, a flood of sophisticated workflow and management programs and plenty of features to handle the inevitable ensuing changes.

For service providers such as the document management solutions market, the definition of “added value” has expanded to include seamless integration, security, flexibility and—much like the services now crowding under the print provider umbrella—one-stop-shop functionality. The following products are examples of the healthy competition alive and well in the solutions marketplace.

Operation Workflow

At On Demand 2007, Ramsey, New Jersey-based Konica Minolta debuted Printgroove, a workflow system built for small to mid-sized print shops and print production.

The system consists of separate modules, allowing particular shops to maximize the software’s capabilities to meet their specific needs. Available modules include Printgroove Serve, which handles customer requests online, including requirements, ticketing and tracking solutions; Printgroove Guide, which manages job trafficking and monitors equipment status; and Printgroove Queue, which assigns print jobs and also manages job volume and multiple bizhub PRO machines.

“Printgroove is an intuitive and powerful job workflow solution that’s affordable, easy to use and fits hand-in-glove with our MFPs [multifunction peripherals],” noted Kevin P. Kern, vice president, product planning and development, Konica Minolta Business Solutions USA. “Printgroove caters to the needs of bizhub PRO customers in the CRD [central reproduction department], in-plant, print-for-pay, commercial printing and data center environments.”

For more information, visit www.sec.kmbs.us/version2/index.html.

Brain Food

Brainware, Ashburn, Va., has upgraded its IDC-distiller (intelligent data capture) document processing solution to version 4.0. The software is capable of capturing, classifying and extracting data from forms and files based on content from differing sources, rather than requiring a standardized format or template for readability. The software can also extract information from e-mails and attachments. According to the company, IDC-distiller can increase document processing speed by at least 60 percent.