10 Reasons to Make the Move to SOLitrack

Hi everyone, thanks for joining. In this session, we’ll go over ten reasons why you may want to implement SOLitrack. SOLitrack provides a lot of functionality which surprisingly can sometimes be a barrier of entry for implementation because there are so many topics of functionality to explore. Today’s list of ten categories will hopefully help clarify where SOLitrack can be a fit for you. As we go through the list, keep in mind that just like with all of our solutions, SOLitrack allows you to start scaled down with a specific goal and then expand with additional capabilities when needed.

Before jumping into the list, here’s a diagram to help show where SOLitrack fits into the overall Chemistry platform. Print Director can be used for connectivity to host systems, data stream conversions, job management, and driving printers. Rubika provides for document modification and re-engineering, and SOLsearcher Enterprise provides for eDelivery and archive. Each of these solutions on their own can log the activity they are performing. The challenges is that these log files are separate, so it’s not very convenient to follow all of the steps for each job’s processing history and status. Where SOLitrack becomes an integral part of the Chemistry workflow is that it can log all of the activity to a centralized database, making it easy and convenient to see and report on the overall processing activity. SOLitrack tracks, jobs, and individual pieces within jobs through the entire workflow from receipt through optimization, manufacturing, distribution, and even to delivery. It does a lot more than just track jobs and pieces, as you’ll see, but let’s start there as our first topic on the list.

Tracking jobs and pieces is typically the main reason customers implement SOLitrack. It can track all jobs when they are received through every step of the production workflow, including mail and eDelivery. You can also track all the way down to the individual mail piece level, recording every touch along the way. With a few configuration options, SOLitrack can be enabled for existing SPDE, Rubika, SOLsearcher and iCONVERT jobs to allow for those jobs to be tracked and reported on. SOLitrack can also integrate with non-Solimar aspects of your workflow, such as finishing equipment and third-party applications through API calls and even manual processes from a shop floor workstation interface.

SOLitrack has both a thick client and a web-based interface. The thick client is used for configuration and some advanced tasks, but most of the functionality is available through the customizable web-based dashboard that can be deployed internally and with the limited view for your external customers. Here you can see the main jobs and then the status of each individual mail piece within each job. The interface can be customized to support what you want the user to have access to, and what’s relevant for them. For example, an operations manager would want to see the overall production information, an operator is typically concerned with the equipment they are managing, and your customers or internal end users just want to see the stats of their jobs.

An important concept to expand on is the difference between job level tracking and piece level tracking, or PLT. Job level tracking is available for every job in SOLitrack, answering important questions like where are jobs in production and will they complete on time? It serves kind of like a digital job bag capturing all of the information about a job in one place. The piece level tracking is an option you can add to SOLitrack. Once added, you will have an additional layer of tracking detail to show where each specific mail piece is at in production, such as when it was printed, reprinted, or viewed. You can even track the delivery status from the USPS. PLT requires integration with SOLsearcher Enterprise along with scanning equipment, so that the status of each piece can be provided. With SOLitrack, both the job level and the piece level tracking coexist within the same system. You can enable PLT only for the jobs that require it, and you can set the pace for when jobs are onboarded into the PLT workflow.

The second item is when SOLitrack is used to support reprint workflows, viewing, and other piece level capabilities that integrates with SOLsearcher Enterprise, or SSE, which is our archive and eDelivery solution. With SSE as part of your workflow, you can use it exclusively as an infrastructure component for piece level tracking, but it can also be leveraged as a full blown document archive supported long term storage, viewing, and ePresentment applications. SSE is a scalable, fault tolerant, horizontal application that integrates easily with CRM and web presentment infrastructure systems. SSE provides for a very flexible framework that can be used in business to business applications like customer service and case management, to business to consumer applications such as retrieving and viewing insurance and bank statements on your customer facing self-service websites. It has a customizable web-based user interface that can easily be branded to suit your needs. It supports content workflows where each user can tailor their own inbox, and searching environments make it easy to deliver output over the web in real time. SSE can assemble multiple documents together and stores your PDF document as single files just as they were created, rather than needing a separate PDF file for each record, which provides for significant cost savings and storage costs.

Topic number three is related to how it’s more important than ever to manage service level agreements, or SLAs, to ensure on-time completion of jobs. With more and more smaller jobs, it gets harder to keep track of them during production. SOLitrack allows you to automatically assign and manage SLAs for jobs as they are ingested. You can easily prioritize your schedule based on SLA dates, so that you never miss a job or let it slip through the cracks. You can set up an overall airport monitor type of display near each work area to show just the work that will hit that area. This lets operators see what they need to get done on their shift, giving them a burn down for a specific manufacturing area.

Our fourth item is integration with other systems. Since SOLitrack collects a lot of data about your print manufacturing process, it can provide reports in a slick dashboard, giving you insights into your operations. It can also share this data with all of your business critical systems such as ERP, print MIS, inventory, billing, shipping, and other systems, helping to remove data silos to help ensure accurate costing, billing, inventory tracking and much more. This integration allows data to flow to and from your business systems in real time, rather than rekeying in data from a stack of job bags and other collection points. Adding third-party systems to workflows is simple. Using multiple APIs, jobs created in third party systems like print MIS and web-to-print systems can be submitted to SOLitrack programmatically. These systems are typically not very good at managing transactional or variable print jobs, since they’re traditionally associated with commercial and on demand work. SOLitrack is targeted for these jobs and can move them through operations while providing status updates to the submitted systems. SOLitrack also has extensive and customizable reporting capabilities, making it easy for users to find the information that they want.

The fifth item is supporting advanced integration with printers and output destinations. Output management has always been a core functionality of our solutions. SOLitrack has some overlap with SPDE in this area, but modernizes it and expands on the capabilities. For example, SOLitrack has a web-based operator console and a multi-user thick client, and the printer icons can be customized. SOLitrack supports, queuing, routing, and printer connectivity with multiple protocols in order to support your various vendor requirements. It supports any device using hot folders, but can also support bidirectional communication capabilities if supported by your printers. For instance, SOLitrack has robust support for IPP and JMF, allowing you to monitor job status and cancel jobs from the printer from within SOLitrack. With JDF and JMF, after jobs have run, you can even retrieve ink and media usage for each job if the printer supports this. Another key feature with JDF is that page level finishing, such as tray calls, jogging and plex, can be controlled when printing PDF files versus having to convert your PDF files to PostScript or IPDS to control finishing.

Related to output performance and optimization, if you have multiple SPDE servers, SOLitrack enables load balancing across them. If the server is busy processing SOLitrack will check the next server until it finds one that is available. This allows you to maximize your processing power and accelerate your SPDE workflows.

The sixth item is intelligent job batching. Many in-plants and service providers are processing a greater number of smaller and more targeted print jobs. SOLitrack has the ability to do intelligent batching. This is the ability to automatically combine like work to improve operational efficiency and postal optimizations. You can create a series of rules that will allow batching to be completely automated. To combine work, you need to be sure that all the jobs have the same manufacturing and distribution plan. If they do, they can all be combined and treated as one big job. But there’s more to it than just concatenating files and printing them together. For example, you can control how large batch files are to account for roll sizes and device capacity. Some benefits to batching jobs are that a smaller number of batches are easier to manage and track than a bunch of individual little jobs. Intelligent batching takes into account SLAs when combining like work, ensuring your work gets out on time. If you’re looking to batch reprints into the next run, SOLitrack can do it automatically. And finally, batching allows for greater postal discounts and faster delivery when using digital commingling, presort, householding, and other postal optimizations. Our overall Chemistry platform workflow also enables you to do batching with composed print files when you don’t have access to the raw input data.

The seventh item on our list is supporting proof and approval workflows. Users can view documents or jobs and then approve the job releasing it for production. SOLitrack supports multi-step approval processes with parallel and serial steps, with notifications and auto approvals based on schedules and events. When using piece level tracking, a variety of special handling workflows can be done, including viewing for individual pieces, diverting at the inserter, suppressing from print or electronic distribution, and more.

Number eight a SOLitrack serving as a dashboard for alerts and reporting. At its core, SOLitrack uses a database to record everything happening in your production print operations. This enables SOLitrack’s powerful alert mechanism that can notify you about a wide variety of easily configured production conditions. You can track the progression of work through all of the overall stages the job goes through, along with the status of each stage. If a job doesn’t hit a defined stage within the specified time limits, alerts can be sent out to notify operations and investigation ss needed. Having a centralized database of processing information also enables comprehensive reporting that allows you to flexibly extract and visualize production data. The reports can be viewed online in the dashboard, downloaded for use with other systems, or using APIs to query the database from other applications.

Item nine is supporting reprint workflows. Managing reprints is a common challenge that can be disruptive to operations, especially when you need to ensure 100% fulfillment for each mail piece. Every job may have different needs for reprinting. Some require fully automated reprints, but others may need manual reprints. Either way, SOLitrack has you covered, SOLitrack allows you to manually regenerate reprints using hand scanners or by keying in mail piece sequence numbers. You can also do a fully automated closed-loop and open-loop reprints using camera systems. And as mentioned earlier, reprints can be batched with like work to print at a later time instead of holding up the rest of the job. If you’re using piece level tracking, the entire reprint process is tracked for each record for complete job reconciliation.

And lastly, number ten on our list is that SOLitrack is a great value. SOLitrack’s core base system makes it easy to build workflows, perform output management, and track your production in a user-friendly web-based dashboard. If you already have our other Solimar Chemistry components, the value is really compounded since integrating SOLitrack takes minimal additional configuration. Doing reprints, batching, approval processing, and duplicate job checking are all very simple to set up and run. Piece level and mail delivery track and take a little more work to set up, but are still fairly simple to implement. The best part is that you don’t have to add all of the features to all of your jobs at one time. You can add basic job tracking with a simple configuration, and then onboard more complex workflows, such as PLT, commingling, and batching at your own pace.

Next, let’s take a look at a customer case study with the State of Colorado that speaks to getting value in a short time frame and meeting their goals. They’re one of the largest in-plant printers in North America, and do virtually all of the printing for the State. They were seeking to automate processes, gain production visibility, and increase efficiency so that they could handle more volume within tight time frames. Previously, they attempted to build an end-to-end dashboard with a competitive product. That product required that the State of Colorado buy services not to just initially build workflows, but to add any additional workflows for ongoing work. This didn’t fit their budget or their culture of wanting to be more self-sufficient and in control, so they decided to try SOLitrack. They had to build out a pretty comprehensive workflow that included automated insertion, closed-loop reprinting, as well as production proofing prior to releasing jobs into production. They were already an existing Solimar customer with Rubika, and SPDE, so it was easy for them to layer SOLitrack over their existing workflows.

Within six months, they were able to onboard all of the work themselves, using existing staff with minimal services from us, which saved them a lot of money compared to the services intensive approach from the other vendor. SOLitrack added several related capabilities to their existing workflows while reducing processing times across the board, such as proofs and approvals, batching and job tracking. For much greater insight about their use of SOLitrack, you can find a few videos on our website where you can learn more details and hear their story directly from them.

Thank you very much for your time. We look forward to hearing from you soon.