Blending Intelligent Automation and PDF Workflows: Solimar and RISO Streamline Production for Sheet-fed Inkjet Printers

Well, welcome everyone, our global customers and partners. Thank you so much for joining us today. And, I’m joined here with Maggie Curry from RISO. Welcome, Maggie. Thanks so much for having me, Mary Ann. Of course, we’re super excited today to talk about how blending our technologies delivers great ROI to customers. We have some success stories we’re going to cover, as well as, the benefits of intelligent automation and other information about Solimar and RISO along with our upcoming events. So again, thanks a lot for joining us today.

We love to show these are our customer Advisory Council member logos. We have 35 this year, which is wonderful. These are folks that we work with all the time we meet with regularly, and we have a lot of case studies with them, as well. And, many of these are RISO customers, as well Maggie. Yeah, we actually, we really enjoy getting to meet customers who have both our product lines and it’s, we’ve been able to learn so much from all of these folks. Yes, Yes. And then later we’ll actually go through and show you some upcoming events. We’re doing some open houses this year at some of their sites, which is great. Yep, so these customers actually help us guide us in our product development and give us lots of good feedback. So, we’re very grateful for everything they do. And some of them, Maggie, have been our customers for over two decades, which is really fun to see.

So, the Solimar platform is called Chemistry, and we’re all about intelligent automation or IA. And, this technology drives all kinds of workflow driven automation. So, we’re going to talk today about our PDF optimization, the integration with JDF and JMF, job and piece level tracking, the ability to household jobs, and even barcode and add dynamic messaging. And then, the ability to actually see jobs with online viewing and give yourself or your customers the abilities you can be self-service. This also supports all levels of data security, as well as, drives accessibility for PDF/UA. And of course, we’re going to be speaking to the ability and demonstration of driving production cut-sheet inkjet printing.

And so, we’ll just kick this off, Maggie, with talking about our PDF optimization called ReadyPDF, which you and your folks probably know even better than I do. That you use it extensively. So, one big benefit of what this product drives and optimizing PDF is that our products can take in virtually any print stream. So, even some of the legacy like AFP or PCL, PostScript and of course even VIPP, and we do lots of transforms, but typically and the best one we do is out to optimized PDF. And then, this enables all kinds of additional functionality. And so, one of the basic things of ReadyPDF, of course, is to cache resources. So, to combine and reuse resources that come in so the files get smaller and smaller. And so, this is huge because then the printers won’t clutch, data will process faster and I’m sure you see lots of benefits in your demo center, as well. We do. We use ReadyPDF for every file that comes into our demo center. So, as long as it’s a PDF, we’re going to optimize it and that’s just become our practice and it’s allowed us to increase the speed of getting jobs and proof of concept back to customers. And, it just overall saves time and allows us to really see what our printers can do. Absolutely. Yeah.

And, one key thing I think to Solimar is that we can do all kinds of font optimization and correction. So, we can embed and consolidate fonts. So, reduce the numbers of fonts. We can replace full font subsets with full font families. And, of course, we find that certain DFEs will reject some fonts so we can fix those or we can actually move them to the side so that they don’t cause any kind of bottlenecks. So, for us in our demo center and our communication center, having to go back to a customer and find out where a font originated, is it in actual usable font and does it need to be in part of the file? This just allowed us to skip so many steps and just get to the heart of the matter, which is making sure the file prints well, process as well on our RIP, so it saves us a ton of time and save our customers time, as well. Absolutely. Absolutely.

And so, are super important in PDF is the ability to tune colors and so typically older applications might come in as RGB and for printing takes CMYK, and we’re putting something out for e delivery, it’s better to leave it in RGB because that’s what will show better on a screen. We can also force black so CMYK to K, and just use the K so saves money, less ink, crisper images, right? We do have customers who actually convert color images of color jobs into black and white, grayscale, so they’re not needed to print in color. And, it’ll save time, as well as, we can set color profiles per job and even per device. And, I think some of your customers have used these features to maybe Maggie. Almost all of my production customers are using ICC color profiles for one reason or another. But for us, the ability to be able to convert that black without having to go back into the native file has proven to be really, really useful. And, many of my customers are asking for us to reduce the amount of color or black ink with an ICC color profile. So, we automate that process. They don’t lose any validity or integrity to the print. It just allows them to save money, you know, overall the entire process. So, we really use a very effectively. Absolutely. Absolutely.

We can also optimize image sizes so files can come in really at any size that may have originally been, you know, a poster image that got embedded into a file, for example. And so, it may be just making this huge file that comes in. So, ReadyPDF can automatically set anywhere from 300 to 600. Our customers get to set what they want the DPI in CMYK, as well as, we can downsample that for eDelivery and archive and that’s typically anywhere from 75 to 100 DPI. And, of course, if it’s E we can even make it in RGB. So again, just nice file size optimization. So, one PDF comes in and multiple versions can go out. Initially, RISO’s place in the industry, in the production industry was in a reprint sort of function. And so, the ability to manipulate all these image sizes has allowed our customers to be able to pull, you know, images and documents from way back when if they need to reprint them. And just as, you know, sort of a quality check in. But this has really been super effective for us.

This is so really important, so to fix structural issues. So, it’s very hard to see on a screen if there’s transparencies. And so, they typically come out because something won’t print correctly or prints out skewed. And so again, we could dynamically fix and flatten transparencies, remove empty objects like XObjects which are just commands that don’t do anything if if they’re empty. We can also remove things like bookmarks from the print which aren’t needed. And, then any additional information like annotations that may have been added for different reasons, we can remove anything that’s extraneous from the document, from a PDF, to make it even smaller. This has been so important, especially the transparency piece. I had a customer that sent me a file to evaluate. They couldn’t figure out why it was taking so long to process on our RIPs and on our printers. We went in and pulled out 90% of the transparencies, ran the job again and the file ran perfectly. So, my customer took that back to their customer and said, you know, can we please address the way this file was designed? And, it just gave them a leg up to be able to say with authority that, you know, it is not our process, it’s yours with authority and in a kind way. But of course, yes, definitely. Yeah.

And then, we use this all the time, of course, so the ability to obfuscate live jobs and basically making them safe to share, to use. And so, this is basically the ability to jumble any and all text fields in a PDF and then go ahead and print that out or send it to others. We like this for tech support to get jobs that are obfuscated. So, because we’re California, we don’t want any of that. We don’t want to have to sign NDAs and all this. I’m sure you don’t either, Maggie, so you use this quite extensively, as well. Yeah, we do, it’s again, just from an overall production standpoint, we’ve been able to cut down the window on going back and forth with a customer with an NDA. This just allows us to take their documents, show them what they want to see on the document. They’re not necessarily concerned with the name on the document. They’re more concerned with what does a document print look like and how does it process. So for us, again, it just it’s sped up everything we’re doing in a very positive way. Yes, definitely.

And, just a few examples of what this obfuscation looks like. So, on the left is the original. You can obfuscate everything. So, anything that is a font field we can obfuscate. We’ll still keep it in that space and you can have exceptions. So, if you want to be able to tell, you know, different areas of what it is, you can have exceptions. You can also combine this with our redaction engine. So, if you wanted to remove a logo, you could do that. So, we’ve had people do that because they have a new product announcement or they don’t want someone to see the customer they’re working with, but they’re having a problem. So, just great to be able to obfuscate or even redact, as needed.

And so, really the goal here is to create automated PDF workflows that are all templatized. So, you know, a one time set, adjust for the next job, and out you go. And so, it’s both for, you know, production, print, whether it’s going to cut sheet or continuous feed, for eDelivery, including PDF/UA for the accessibility. We often feed that over to our accessibility partner, Allyant. For secure proofing, as well as, making archives, which can also serve up in HTML5. So, that’s even the preferred method to see, you know, a PDF that’s stored in an archive, for example. So again, one PDF in and multiple use cases and benefits out.

So, I thought I’d just show a quick screenshot here. So, I like to say, this is a no code configuring version. Here’s a template inside ReadyPDF. Most people just use the flexible configuration. It has the all kinds of standard settings that we would have. The nice thing is you can add additional settings, as well. So, you can make special templates for all kinds of specific needs. We do have some customers that also use this because their client will not allow them to do a font update, even though we’re going to keep the fidelity. So, in that case we will keep anything you want. So, you have full options here. It’s all again menu, UI driven and again, we can all use this and it works great out of the box.

And then, of course, we love to create before and after files. You can set have those reports set to any file. Some of our customers use these more in the rear. Like what did we do last month? This will give you color usage, fonts, all the updates we did per job. We’ll actually go through this and whatever you want reporting on, you can actually get. And, I know you guys use this quite a bit, as well at RISO. Again, from our perspective when we’re trying to talk to customers about our printers, the challenge is always trying to get in files that again, it’s very hard to go back to the native design of that file. That person who created that file potentially ten years ago. I always refer to them as in witness protection. You can never find that original person who did the InDesign file, and by the time it gets PDFed multiple times, you’ll see that there are just compounding errors in that file. So, this again, has been really helpful for us to be able to say to someone, that file took 16 hours to process because of, you know, A your fonts. It could be because of transparencies, it could be because of the way the file was designed. But the fact that we can fix it and then move on, we don’t like looking backwards, right? So, it’s important for us to keep the ball moving down the field. So, this has been really, really helpful for us. But if they can’t fix it, we can, right? So, as we see as we see all the time. Yeah. They never want to fix it. They want you to work with it. So this for a lot of us, a lot of people don’t want to go back to the customer, you know, they don’t want to go and, you know, shake, shake that hornet nest there.

So, one of our partners took ReadyPDF and tested it on all kinds of their golden jobs. Things that already print on a regular basis of all different types. And so, the great thing is these are all, you know, perfect jobs that they print currently and they ran them through ReadyPDF, and the cool thing is that they got some amazing results. They put a whole presentation together and I made it into a slide. But just to show what it is. But the biggest thing I think, a couple of things, certainly the RIP speed. So, the files became over 100 times smaller than what they were before. So, if you think of, you know, being a green effect using less energy, things just process so much faster, files move around far easier, file sizes would reduce hugely. We adjusted all the fonts. We fixed lots of the color spaces and of course right sized all the images again with 100% fidelity. And so, we love doing these reports and this validation testing. And so, I just wanted to share this with you as well, because it’s across all kinds of applications, transactional, direct mail, books, postcards, etc.. So, this really benefits any environment.

And so, we do have a white paper from Keypoint, Keypoint Intelligence. And, what they did is they also took the ReadyPDF rated against lots of live jobs as well, catalogs, all kinds of things. And so, with the catalogs they found a 14 times size reduction per over all kinds of catalogs. And, even in transactional work, they found about seven. When they went and did a white paper for us, they found about 40% file size reduction across all kinds of PDFs. But to me, the biggest and important thing here is also the time savings. So, you know, 30 minutes savings per prepress shift operator per day just from having to handle and work with, you know, big, huge files and not knowing what the problem is. And so, this is a white paper and I’ll send a link in this, as well, and you can go ahead and download it if you’d like to read it.

One of our customers, Washington State Department of Energy Enterprise Services, we have a whole case study on them. And, Michael Z, told us that with ReadyPDF, they cut their prep time in prepress and even production 45%. And, when you’re working with a small staff and large volumes and large sales, that’s just a huge, huge savings there.

RevSpring, as well. Great customer. They use ReadyPDF, they’ve used it for a long time and now they use it to actually ingest every PDF that comes into RevSpring, gets optimized before it goes into their factory. And so, you know, just huge benefits in finding that basically they found it catches like 90% of all their problems right in front. And so, things process quickly and correctly and then they have to go deal with a few exceptions, which are usually just bad files in general. So, I think they also use RISO printer, Maggie. Yeah, they actually just installed a RISO Valezus printer and they’ve been able to get that machine up and running really quickly. We’re very pleased with it, but it’s also very helpful to us that we’re running in tandem with Solimar. So, anything that any output that’s coming to us, we know is pretty spot on. So, it’s been really pleasant. That will be great to update the case study soon. that’ll be wonderful.

So, you know, along with all the PDF optimization, a big part of what we offer is the ability to digitally retrofit data and documents which we call post composition. And so, how we differ from composition is, you know, we let other companies, other design tools, whether it’s OpenText, or Quadient, or InDesign, whatever it is, create whatever it is on the composition side. And then, typically all of those feed into Chemistry, into our platform, and that’s because we’re going to create optimized output, typically PDF for any and all devices and even, you know, ePresentment, for example. So, we know what the DFEs like, we know what the Fiey likes, we know what the TAG likes, we know what EQUIOS likes. So, we can actually send optimized data for whatever that factory has, as well as, drive finishing as well as put out a separate PDF for all the E side, which can be again smaller and even for example, RGB.

One, of course, the big product that many, many hundreds of customers use, if not thousands, is called Rubika. And, this does what I like to call it document facelifting. So, taking existing documents and making them better. Don’t have to go back to composition, try to redesign something is going to take forever and approvals and all that. So, we can easily, Rubika has like 30 modules that it can do all kinds of things, right? This example kind of shows again, we can overlay new images, we can mask or even, you know, remove confidential information, We can add color, add barcodes, add messaging. So again, taking that existing document, I call it like a lift in load, Pick it from here, put it over here, shake off the, you know, preprinted stock that may have been around that and just do it all digitally. One of the things I like about the samples, when you see that you actually get an onsert, so you’re we’re making use of all the whitespace that may not be being used properly. It just gives us our customers another avenue to sort of message to them. I think that’s really great. Yes, definitely.

And speaking of messaging, this is just an example that I made on how to add dynamic messaging. We did a CAC customer advisory council meeting and I had an analyst talk about that there’s some new laws coming into place in certain states that require direct mail to actually have a message added to it that basically says this is not a bill. And it’s crazy, it has to be like a 14 point font and it’s really big and ugly. But if you’re forced to add these and you haven’t put that into your design yet, either way, so Rubika can add this in and just for certain locations and just for certain pieces. So, just an example, again, it’s not attractive, but it’s super important. And again, we can add this dynamically so you’re compliant.

And so, also what we do quite a bit is move files from commercial to digital and we can do this with deimposition. We can take a catalog, a booklet or a book and actually deimpose it back into a 1-up PDF. And then, the beauty there is now you can print this on an inkjet printer or a cut sheet printer, you can put it online for a storefront, for example, or you can even, and I’ll show you an example with Mayo Clinic, break this up into little booklets now that are actually customized. And so, the is proving to help companies who are moving from the really large sets of print volumes into smaller and more personalized pieces that can again be offered and printed even in-house.

And so, oftentimes, though, once we deimpose something back into a 1-up PDF, you need to re-impose it because maybe you have different web sizes, maybe you want to print it on the cut sheet. So, its easy to go ahead and take that one document that was printed over here on a 40 inch web, you’re going to now printed here more of a two up or four up, for example, depending on what the application is. And, we have a very easy to use visual tool as part of the Rubika process.

And so, as I mentioned, Mayo Clinic, a long time customer of ours. You know, right before COVID, they were looking at this project. So, basically they create these patient booklets or folders at the time, and so nurses would kind of go with a ticket of sorts and kind of pull all the pieces needed and there were thousands, by the way, and then assemble them into packets, into folders, and these would get mailed. And so, you know, the obvious challenges in that is the stock could be old. It’s laborious. It takes a while to build all these things. And, a nurse would actually have to do this as opposed to doing, you know, what they’re critical jobs are and then it might even get mailed out, you know, late depending on, you know, the post office, and you know, when things get actually put into envelopes. So, what we presented last year at Xplor with Mayo Clinic was the ability to make personalized patient booklets. And, it’s actually won the application of the year last year, which was great. And, the nice thing was they’re able to actually migrate since we already had all that information in those booklets and pamphlets and things in PDF, pulled all of that into a job ticket and actually put on some, you know, intelligence there. And now, with Rubika especially, it creates dynamic booklets. So, it takes all the bits and pieces out from all those, all those statements and all of those forms, makes the table of contents, repaginates, and they get to print these with a personalized letter and they put these in-house on their production inkjets. And so, people get much more timely information. They can also put in, you know, healthy information. You know, how to live with certain issues that they’re dealing with. And, they can also put this into the archive so they can get it online. And this actually, you know, and the nurses can actually help them there from an E site, as well. They can make a call, walk them through a book because before they’d say, you know, pull out the orange pamphlet, pull out this pamphlet. And so, what’s so great about this is not only did it provide better patient care, but the nurses are much happier. They can give better care with more timely information. And again, they’re not worried about ordering supplies and making booklets. And so, perfect application as well, even for a cut sheet inkjet. We want to keep all the nurses happy, right? We sure do. Yes. Yes.

And, speaking of the digital retrofit, the IWCO case study we have on our website that I’ll reference later, talked about how when they added on a number, like seven HP PageWide printers into their two factories that already have SCREEN and Canon. Well, the PageWides had a half inch difference on the cut line and so they were wondering, you know what should we do? Should we go back and fix the composition tool, should we change the DFE? And luckily, we said, no, no, you have Rubika. Rubika can fix that. So, we can actually dynamically adjust the jobs, those jobs and where they’re going to all their different finishing devices, saving them more than $10,000 per cutter or per finishing because they were going to have to either add or replace the cutter part of the system. And so overall, they estimated at least $110,000 of cost savings by not having to change their existing finishing. Even though they had new equipment coming in. So again, just think about digitally retrofitting the data and documents to fit whatever people have in the factories. And so, super valuable, saved a ton of time to have to take a cutter off one at a time, and they would have had to do all the retrofit work on those.

So now Maggie, people with cut sheet inkjets typically to get the finishing would have to create PostScript, right? So, we would actually have to do AFP to PostScript or even PDF, back into PostScript. And PostScript typically creates pretty large files. And so now, right, we have a PDF and JDF workflow that also works perfectly on the RISO. Yes. So, we’ve actually been able to use our JDF feature on our RIPS and on our printers and so we’ve now been able to go back to customers who have been using very, you’re not joking when you say very, large PostScript files, because we didn’t have a tool, we could have done some bookmarking in PDFs to modify that PDF and trigger a tray call or to do any other additional finishing. But the way that Solimar has set this up has made it so much easier for our customers not only to utilize it, but to learn how to utilize it, right? So, from our perspective, it’s just a huge win because we’re able to modify the, you know, reduce the file size so our customers aren’t as concerned about just simple file storage. But when you’re processing a very large file, you can create a lot of issues. And again, we want our very fast printers to be printing very fast all the time. It’s important to us that we’re very productive. So, this is just, this solves so many problems for us and for more importantly for our customers. So, we’re really, really pleased how it’s turned out. And so, how JDF works with PDF is that we actually create JDF job tickets. And so, a job ticket goes, its basically like a wrapper, I like to think of it, around a PDF, right? And then, it’s going to give commands as to the printer and really any other JDF enabled device as to what to do. So, one job can have lots of information, basically nodes in it. So if it goes to the RISO do this, if it goes to the continuous feed, obviously don’t add a paper tray because that’s not going to happen. And so, this kind of goes through the system and again, seamlessly routes the PDFs to all the different desired workflows. Yeah, we’ve seen this really speed up our customers prepress time and processing time, but more importantly, every, I don’t have a single customer who just has one type of manufacturer on their floor. So, the fact that we can actually say, you know, the RISO has four trays and we do media positioning versus it’s just it’s allowed us to get to the job at hand, which is getting our customer’s files printed and out the door.

Absolutely. And, we have a couple examples, right? ECSI being the first one. Why don’t you gives a little background and this customer. Here at ECSI Heartland processes the majority of the US’s student loan payments and they’ve been a long time RISO customer and for us when we first, their third generation of RISO products, they had our equipment for quite some time and we noticed on this last go around with them that they were actually taking in HTML data and then they were converting it to PDF, and then they had to convert it again to PostScript in order to use our devices effectively because they are doing tray pulls with perf paper. And, we did actually do a few other few other things with Rubika. But most importantly for us is we cut down on the processing time. We’re able to validate their data. We’re able to get that file processed and to our printers to pull correct tray calls and then get it to their inserter. So, we actually took their, you know, their workflow and improved it on the front end. And then, on the back end, we reduced the amount of printers that they used. We added Fiery RIPs. So, we have more automation with them as well, and we reduced the amount of printers they had from 10 to 6. And, in January, they made their number with two weeks to spare, meaning they had to get these jobs out the door and they were two weeks faster than they were the prior year with more actual printers. So, it’s been a real great success for us. Wonderful. Yeah. So, it’s a full PDF workflow, right, along with the JDF that drives your six re ComColors there. Wonderful.

And then, here at Intact, I know we love Robert, he’s wonderful to work with. Tell us a little bit about the Intact Insurance story. Sure, so Intact Insurance became an opportunity for all three of us, Solimar, Pitney Bowes, and RISO. So, because of the nature of what they were trying to get done, so they originally came to us and asked us to convert AFP to PDF. And we obviously, RISO didn’t have a partner that could do that until we found you guys and then what we were able to do is then take those files, modify them and use all these tools. SOLitrack, Print Director, SOLfusion. But most important for us is we did a seamless conversion from AFP to PDF. So now, everything is printing PDF and we are using JDF to do tray calls and do bi-directional communication with those printers. And then, of course, even more important was the fact that they were redundant. And, I think Bob gives us a little information on that at some point. Yes, and we also drive their Pitney Bowes inserters and we create the MRDFs, as well. So yes, absolutely. And so, when we talked to Bob, yeah, he had some great things to say about. Why don’t you talk about this. Sure. So, they actually were completely outsourced, their solution, and they were able to bring in all their print and all their inserting. So, the partnership between Solimar, Pitney Bowes, and RISO really allowed them to build their own solution. And so, you’ll see his quotes here that 70% of the output is moved over to automated insertion, which again, if you looked at their staff size, it’s impressive what they’ve learned, but they’re able to do it much more efficiently, much more affordably, always with the goal of being redundant. So, you can’t really mess around with people’s insurance information. And again, he and his quote is great. They’ve hit 100% uptime for their SLA since going live. Absolutely. Yep, yep, yep.

So, tell us a little bit about your printers. Sure. So, RISO has been developing cut sheet inkjet printers for the past 20 years. We’re now on the eighth generation of our product development, and that is the Valezus product. So, we have a single engine option, which is the GL9730 that will print 165 pages per minute full color inkjet. We use an oil based pigmented ink that is ideal for anything post print, meaning inserting, any type of mailing equipment, or any type of finishing equipment. So, we create a cold, flat and dry output. Our oil based ink is waterproof, so it’s a very durable print. And, what we’ve really been doing is just taking our very, you know, very, very robust engine and developing accessories and other sort of product line ups, including the Valezus. And the Valezus allows us to print 330 images per minute full duplex in full color with high capacity print options, high capacity finishing options. And then, we have a variety of RIPS so we can print in PDF, PostScript AFP, IPDS on the Valezus with our AlphaStream RIP, and then on our GL series, we’re very fond of our Fiery partner and we have a lot of Fierys out in the field. So, really the product lineup for us is just focusing on cost control, ease of use, and making sure that from a daily operational perspective, our customers are saving money and getting all the print out into the mail or anywhere else they need it to go, including, you know, to be stored on servers, to be recalled, so. So, what I love is that these are both production printers, like for a lot of in-plants and even small and mid-sized print bureaus. And then, for the really large print providers, these are all their backup printers. And so, they do all the reprints, they do the custom applications. We’re going to see some applications that are perfect for the RISO, as well. So, its nice you just fit in, and we have so many mutual customers everywhere we go. It’s so fun to travel with you because again, we have so many mutual customers everywhere and so we both can benefit from them in lots of ways.

And, some of the great applications that that you might want to speak to some of these that we took some pictures of. We did a video, as well, and we can add in a link later.So, well over 10 or 15 years ago, we started looking at integrated ID cards or membership cards. More often than not, this is an application that would be run on a toner based device, but it’s difficult to do on toner because those two cards have a slight perforation around them. And, our feed system allows us to run these files in duplex really, really effectively. We don’t lose, those cards stay where they need to stay. The quality looks great. Front to back registration is good and so again, this is a solution that would have cost a customer, I don’t know, probably ten times more than what they would spend to run it on a RISO.

Definitely, and then ballots, of course. We have multiple customers running ballots of all heavy paperweights and sizes. And for us, again, they have a short window to be able to get these ballots out into the mail or to be at an election center. So, again, reliability is really important. The ability to put down color, highlight color. And then, of course, most important is that these barcodes and any other indicators get scanned properly. Absolutely. And, think of all of the state and city and even county, you know, elections that have to go on. I mean, cut sheet is so perfect for that because it has to be personalized, right, to to keep track of all of them. But at the same time, it’s a quick turn and they need typically, you know, lots of volume, you know, very, very, very quickly.

Right. Yeah so, and then this one from Canada. I know you blurred a little bit so we wouldn’t be able to tell who its for. Yeah so, this is actually for a Canadian agency that it’s basically anybody, any military person that was hurt specifically, you know amputees which is really, I think, an amazing application. And so, this basically has to perfs, that top section of that file is blurred because it did have some some information we didn’t want to share. But you’ll notice barcodes, you’ll notice color, you’ll notice the ability to on the right hand side, those are actual physical tags that get added to the print page after it’s already gone through its whole entire process. So, again, one of the great things about my job is I keep finding new applications and new ways to use our printers. And, this literally I picked up last week in Quebec. So, really interesting to see what they’re doing. And again, this is important information. They want to get this information out to their members, whether to see the money or to notify them of some of a perk or something that they’re entitled to use. So really. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yep.

And so, one thing we didn’t mention in both the ECSI and Intact is that they both use SOLitrack, which is our sort of umbrella universal tracking system. And, what this provides is the ability so they can track every piece of all their jobs, every piece of mail, you know, all the way through their factory from receipt, all the way to delivery. And, what’s nice is we can watch any and all devices they have. So, we can watch the presses, the cut sheets, if these are JDF, for example, as well as even wide format. So, we can watch anything in the factory. But if it’s JDF enabled we typically can see what it’s doing. It can give us nice feedback as to I need more paper, my door is open or, you know, just tell us with what’s going on. And so, then we wrap these again around with the JDF job ticket. This as an example, you know, so we know what the different devices need. And so again, you get to see, you have to see what’s going on in the factory. And so, when we designed this, we started with small screen. So, SOLitrack is like a car. Think of an engine and a dashboard. So, you make all your rules and decisions in the engine and then you design the dashboard. So I’m like, you get a very different dashboard than someone else. So, internally we might want to see everything. Your customers can also just get mini views as to, we got your job, you printed your job, hey, approve this.

So, you kind of see. So, I took a couple of screenshots just to show some examples. And so, what’s nice is this is fully skinnable, fully secure, as well. So, it has single sign on, and once you sign on that will tell you what you have access to. So, you might get reports. These can also just be emailed to you even a few times a day, if you want an SLA schedule, for example, If you have approval, you can open up a job, look at a job, and even go ahead and hold, reject, or, you know, let the job go through. You can look up devices and see what the messaging is per device, what is it printing. Maybe that might help you make a decision like, hey, we need to split this job in two to get it out today, you know, for yourselves. And then, also it has a full alert system built in so this can watch really any process, any device and even per multiple locations. So, if you want, again, information on jobs that are coming in or again, devices, you can get alerts right there and then make decisions as to what to do.

And so, one of the options, too, is has a due out schedule and again, customizable, change the colors, change the name. But you know, what do we need to get up today? What’s tomorrow looking like? Past due also maybe jobs on hold because this has a SQL back end so now people actually don’t lose jobs. You actually cannot if you delete it. We still have a record trail of it. What do we get out and where are we right now? Some people will put this up on big screens, you know, throughout their factories. But again, it’s all visible right on your phone, as well. And, we love to say, right, Maggie, who would like to see right now what’s going on in your factories? You might not want to, but it’s probably better that you know, today versus not knowing. Better to address it and move on then have to come back in the next day and clean up about. Exactly. Yep.

This integrates with USPS, as well, for piece mail tracking. So, this is great for call centers. You know, people calling in saying I didn’t receive this. So again, instead of doing a reprint call, which would have been before, let me get a reprint for you. Reps can look it up now. Yep, that’s in the mail. You should have gotten it or you will get it. Actually show if it got delivered. It will also show you if something got returned. So, if there was a bad address, it’s coming back. You can let your customers know right away. Hey, this person isn’t there, you know, they moved or whatever. So, super beneficial for the delivery side, as well. This is also a full open API, so this can integrate into DHL, FedEx, you know, any kind of courier, as well. So, wherever you want to track where your things go, SOLitrack is great for that.

And then, of course, you get dynamic reports. So, anything you want to know and this example kind of shows ink and usage per device and per job that’s going through. And so again, different DFEs will give us different information and not always exact, but it’s still super helpful information to make decisions going forward.

It does have a self-serve proof and approval model. This is just an example of what it could look like. But for example, to be able to pull up a form and look at this, look at this and decide, you know, do we want to put this on hold? Many of our customers who have banks, for example, their CSRs, get about 2 hours every morning to do digital pulls for whatever reason. And so, they can put something on hold or they can reject it. They can also reject things, you know, don’t send the, don’t send the mean letter because they paid their bill. So, we don’t need to say we’re going to turn your power off. So again, and then what’s nice is they can actually put a note in as to why they’re holding or rejecting something. So again, just making everything self-service versus, you know, going off emails and trying to figure out, you know, what jobs to pull. This can be full jobs, again, or pieces of jobs. And so really, we just want to have everybody be in the know, know what’s going on in your factory, get information you want. You can also customize what you get on your mobile so you don’t have to see everything. You may just want your alerts and other important details there. But again, just great to be in the know with multiple, you know, visibility and this helps RISO as well as as many of our customers. 100%.

And so, we have a number of events coming up. We thought we just put this in at the end here. And so, the first in a few weeks is the INg conference. This is the Imaging Network Group. Not everyone may know what this group is, but it’s basically, you know, privately held service providers that get together a few times a year. RISO and Solimar are long time sponsors of this event, and we’re going to be in Napa in a few weeks. So, those of you who will be there, we’re excited to see you again and just and lovely Napa in a few weeks.

Our first open house this year, one of our customers is April 2nd and 3rd at the Kennickell Group. Now, we’re actually going to be at the Kennickell Group on the 3rd. The 2nd is kind of a welcome reception in lovely Savannah, Georgia. And so we have customers, a few partners, Maggie will be there, and I do have a few spots open for other guests that we’re inviting, as well. So, if you’re interested, let me know and happy to get you, happy to discuss coming to this event.

And then after that in May, the Document Strategy Forum is going to be in RISO’s backyard in Boston and so have lots of customers coming. We’ll have a booth there, as well. So, if you’re going to be going to this conference, please look us up. We will both be there along with some other folks locally will be joining us as well.

And of course, the big one, of course, is Drupal, right? That’s coming up at the end of May, it starts, until June. We’ll be in multiple partner booths. Maggie will be there, as well. So, if you’re going to be there, let us know so we can find places to meet you because it’s a huge event. If you haven’t been there before, it’s a five mile Messe, but it’s very fun. People print everything there. Absolutely everything. Great event. And again, if you’re going to be there, we’d love to see you there.

And so, just as a leave behind when I send it, when I create the handout for this, you’ll have a link to lots of our blogs which are super helpful. Lots of handouts in there about how we do JDF, how this all works. Blogs on security, anyway, so we have great blogs. We have white papers you can download, as well. That again, there’ll be links in here. Lots of case studies which also typically have video interviews, as well.

So again, I’ll put the links in here and those of you who are customers or partners, we have Solimar University Online. And so, this has just a plethora of information, you know, how-to videos on virtually all of our products. And, I know you guys use this quite extensively, as well. So, when we do something special for a partner or a customer, we’ll make your own bucket and then the replays will go in there. So, if you want to watch something again or you get a new employee, they can go watch the workflow video. And, I know you guys use this, as well. Everyone I know, everyone in our communication center is trained and they’ve been using Solimar University from the beginning. And now, we’re training others of your sites, including Mexico City. So, that’s just so great.

And so really, we really focus on ROI, right, Maggie. We really focus on how can we save you time, how can we save you money? Our solutions are so complementary and they go together so nicely. This is a bit of an eye chart, but just to give you an example of where the products all fit, everything we have is modular. And again, with the JDF workflow, you know, the way I like to say it’s kind of bonus. You get additional time savings, cost savings and then you get good information, as well. Absolutely, and for us to be able to solve a problem that has sort of bedeviled a customer for a long time, I mean, we all live in a world where technology changes so much, We really did not have a great solution to move away from PostScript and to communicate bi-directionally really well with our printers. So, this is really, it’s changed our world and it’s more important than that. It’s changed our customers world. Definitely. And, I’m just so grateful for our partnership too. Our companies were so great together. And again your folks just, you know, how they use it in the demos. And, I think it’s so important because you know, I’m going to call out Juanita, who’s just a lovely lady and super smart and super helpful. And so again, I think people if you don’t know us, I think you’ll find our teams to be extremely responsive, really eager to solve problems. And, everything we do, we can show you ahead of time now, which is so great. We can do demos. We can again send back the samples, Maggie, that you do with, with the before and after files, as well.

So, with that, just want to say thank you all so much for your time today. I hope you found this interesting. Again, I’ll create a handout with lots of links in here. Maggie and I are very reachable, right Maggie. Painfully reachable. So, if you reach out with any question, any ideas you have, things you’d like to see, we’re happy to jump on a call or set up a zoom or a teams and show you anything you’d like to see. And again, you’ll get all the links in this handout as well. So, thank you so much for joining me today. Maggie. Any last words you like to add? No, just we’re excited about the future and we’re excited to help our customers, you know, move forward and save money and really utilize all the tools they have at their disposal. So, it’s been great. Thanks, Mary Ann. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful day, everyone. Thanks again. Bye bye.