If you pay attention to advertising, you’ve probably seen claims of how “Product X” is going to help you and your company to “stop wasting time” or “save time”.  In the world of professional print production, this is usually a claim made in conjunction with workflow automation solutions as it automates repetitive tasks.    

However, it’s not “wasted time” that workflow automation helps eliminate and in this short article we’ll look at the differences between tasks that waste time and tasks you spend time on. There is an important difference and it affects the tools needed to help reduce or eliminate time spent, or time being wasted.    

Spending vs Wasting time 

To start, we need to understand the difference between tasks or activities that waste time and tasks you spend time doing. In general, you spend time doing a needed or planned task and you waste time when you’re following up on a task that should have already been done.   Here are a couple examples.    

Spending time example: When a file is sent in for production, it is given to prepress to preflight for any technical errors or issues that will impact printing the job. Prepress will “spend” time doing the preflight.    

Wasting time example: A customer service representative (CSR) tells the print buyer they need their final file by the end of the day Wednesday so it can go to press on Friday. Thursday morning, the CSR realizes they didn’t see anything from the client. They double check their email inbox and spam folder to make sure they didn’t miss the file. They check the Drop Box server to see if anything was uploaded yesterday or last night. Then they check the FTP server to see if anything was uploaded.  Finally, confident nothing was sent in, they call the client only to get voice mail. They leave a message and also send an email reminder.  The CSR is now concerned the file may not make it in time and the daily production planning meeting is in ten minutes!   

You can see in the second example, because the print buyer did not follow through on their task, the CSR “wasted” time double checking everything and trying to contact the customer to see if the file was sent in at all. To make matters worse, without hearing back from the customer by the daily production planning meeting, others may end up wasting more time working around the delay.    

According to a McKinsey Global Institute report, employees spend 1.8 hours every day searching and gathering information. On average, that's 9.3 hours per week or more than a whole day wasted!      

The right tool for the right time 

Going back to the tasks that you, or employees spend time on such as the preflight task, you can probably see where a workflow automation solution such as Enfocus Switch could 100% automate that task. Even an application such as PitStop Pro or PDF ToolBox could give the prepress operator a tool to reduce the amount of time they spend doing the task. This would, in turn, save time and therefore, save money.    

Finding solutions to reduce or eliminate “wasted” time, that’s a little more difficult. Wasted time is unique because in most cases, its unpredictable. Often, it’s the human factor and how it plays in the process of wasting time.    

Where processes work great when everyone sticks to the script, when they don’t, chaos erupts. Plus, often the event causing the time to be wasted is not the core issue. For instance, in our example time was wasted by the CSR search for the job file, yet the root cause was that the customer either didn’t send the file or didn’t communicate that they did and where they put it. In print production, this is all too common.   

To help reduce wasted time there are a variety of tools available depending on what problem you’re trying to solve. There are tools for project management such as Trello or Jira that can help track more complex jobs.  Time management, scheduling, reminder services, from companies like Google or Microsoft.    

However, there are a several problems with these solutions.  ·      

• The tools are built for predetermined tasks and not the unpredictable human factor.

• The tool is not built for print production and may be cumbersome to use. ·      

• Getting employees to use the tools may be a problem on its own.    

The problem with finding a solution to help reduce wasted time in the printing industry, is that there is no clear answer. No single solution does it all or does it in a way that speaks to print production. The solution needs to be pieced together in many cases, making it hard to train employees or keep them using it after they’re trained.    

The worst part is, tasks that waste time, waste a lot of time! Just in our examples, where preflighting a file may take 5-10 minutes per-file on average, the CSR wasted probably 30 minutes or more trying to hunt down the file that should have been sent in already. Someday, there will be a solution that addresses the human factor in print production and in the end, will help reduce wasted time.    

— About the author: Michael Reiher has been creating award winning software applications and solutions for the graphic arts and printing industry for over 25 years.