4 Ways Rubika Can Empower Smart Batching Workflows

For every manufacturing process, there’s an optimal job size. While it is possible to print a ten page job, it is not the optimal size for most production processes. Jobs are always going to be too big or too small. Rubika can segment large jobs into smaller chunks to optimize them for production.

The opposite is to use Rubika to batch together like work to hit that optimal size. This presentation explains four ways Rubika can improve batching workflows. Print volumes in general are going down. This is especially true for the transactional print market. Most print operations struggle handling a larger number of smaller jobs. Each job you process has overhead. Jobs must be printed, finished and distributed. There is no doubt one 1000-page job is more efficient than 1000 one-page jobs. This is where batching can help. Batching is the combining of like work in order to achieve operational efficiency. You can batch like work together, can be manufactured as if it were a single job. All of the jobs in the batch have the same status as the job itself, reducing the level of effort to manage and track them through production.

Instead of tracking jobs, we track batches of jobs. One way that Rubika can help with batching is to re-engineer jobs to fit in a standard job profile. My definition of batching is to combine like work. Like work shares the same print, finishing and distribution plan. One way you can do this is to define and offer standard products with the intent of combining them together for production. This is easy when you have control over composition. If you don’t, you can use Rubika to move address blocks move page contents, and otherwise fit content into the standard format. This will obviously not work for every job, but it can work for some. Moving address blocks can help move work from a custom windowed envelope to a standard windowed envelope.

Rubika can be used to add control marks, barcodes, splitting and slip-sheeting of outputs so that you can manage the output for things like separating jobs in the batch. Automation is the key to maintaining and enhancing profitability in any operation. Rubika is designed to run in a fully-automated prepress environment. SOLfusion can not only automate Rubika, but your entire workflow. SOLfusion allows you to kick off a batching process at a specific time, allowing for work to accumulate at the scheduled time. It can be combined and put into production also. Rubika allows you to optimize the way that pages are presented to post-press processes, read the exact page order slip sheets, collation splitting and segmenting needed to reduce manual processes post press. This can eliminate much of the handling post print. Combining a lot of smaller jobs can create another problem. Big and sometimes inefficient files. Rubika can help here too. When combining files, it will automatically do a variety of optimizations that can dramatically reduce file size and runtimes for many types of work batching has done using compact assembly or commingle, which all do a great job of caching resources within PDF files, which makes files much more efficient. If you need comprehensive PDF optimization should take a look at ReadyPDF can do a lot more than just optimizing resources and fonts.

Postage can be the most expensive part of a mailing, and batching can work to save a lot of money on postage. Digitally commingling mail results in a larger number of pieces and a higher saturation for that mailing with more pieces in each zip code. You can qualify for higher discounts and get faster delivery. This depends on the kind of mailing you’re doing, of course. Rubika, along with electronic presort software, can improve your mailings in other ways too. National change of address and CASS/PAVE processing can greatly improve deliverability. Making bigger mail drops saves the paperwork and handling required for smaller mailings. Remember, Rubika doesn’t do the sorting, but it integrates with postal processing software, which does used with SOLfusion.

Scheduling like work can be accumulated over a period of time. If there are multiple communications going to the same address, it can be combined and sent in a single envelope in a process called household. Many times you see this an insurance claims processing, but there are other applications across industries. Of course there are limitations from a business standpoint. You can’t just combine any communications going through the same address, but for some applications it can save a lot of postage, paper and envelopes and also create a better customer experience. I find it frustrating and wasteful to receive multiple letters from the same center in the same day.