Freeflowing (adjective)
Xerox FreeFlow Core orchestrates your print room. Connecting your print devices, finishing, pre-press and other digital investments. Use it to improve the harmony of your operation. A symphony, if you will, of hardware and software.
Classical music puns aside, we’d like to talk a little bit about FreeFlow Core and why we think it should appeal to a wide range of commercial printers; from medium-sized operations to larger setups.
Where are your pain points? Is it the actual printing, or is it the steps you need to take before and after the printing? The time preparing and checking jobs, pre-press steps and distribution? We would put a bet on it often being the latter.
Xerox believe that as much as 75% of the cost of printing is related to the non-printing parts of the business, and this is where reducing manual steps and fixups can make the difference to your competitiveness, and, ultimately, your bottom line. Cutting down the time it takes to get jobs on and off the press, especially short runs with limited turnaround time, opens up opportunities and frees up time for additional jobs.
What’s more, investing in FreeFlow Core brings intelligent automation, consistency of output and streamlining of repetitive manual processes. You can also try new things more easily; for example, you could remap a colour or specific font/size combination in a customer’s pdf to print gold or silver embellishments automatically, with no designer necessary. Can you meet customer expectations? Or exceed them? Reduce wastage? With FreeFlow Core, that 24-hour-turn-around will be more easily achievable for a larger proportion of jobs.
But isn’t it difficult and time consuming to set up? Well, not really. The drag and drop interface is browser-based and has been designed specifically for non-programmers. A little practise and the logical and consistent workflow controls make it simple to create workflows that automate various parts of the print process. Controls include colour management, imposition, press marks, barcodes, image enhancements, variable print, and much more.
With ‘dynamic imposition’ and rules-based automation hundreds of templates aren’t necessary. The system can automatically step up business cards, posters and flyers into print-ready output and juggle a large number of document sizes and file formats.
Is it really that clever? Yes. Intelligent rules-based automation means that FreeFlow Core is fully flexible in a way that most prepress applications are not. It automates the actual decisions as well as the operations. What’s more, it can send jobs to the most suitable device, whether that be based on usage, capabilities or availability (‘Device Capability Matching’). Images not good enough? Bleed missing from supplied file? Core will flag it up to you and in most cases can fix it on the fly leaving your operators free to do other things.
Yes, but I don’t need a complicated solution in my circumstances? No problem! FreeFlow Core is modular. You can just add the modules you feel are necessary and evolve your package as the need or opportunity arises. There are on premises and cloud options available.
Ahhh, but I don’t have a fully Xerox fleet?! Was that one of your thoughts? No matter. FreeFlow Core supports multi-vendor printing because much of what it does is upstream from the printer. Whether some, all, (or none!), of your devices are Xerox, the open architecture build means that FreeFlow Core can work with any structured data, ultimately opening up opportunities for a fully automated web-2-print and finishing workflow using industry-standard Hot Folders and JDF/JMF compliance.
OK, but can I afford it? Contact our specialists now to see how much you could save by automating one (or several more) of your print touchpoints. You’ll be surprised how quickly it might pay for itself.
Here at First Copy we believe a look at Xerox FreeFlow Core (and its additional optional modules, Advanced Prepress and Advance Automation) is definitely worth your time – and we can even hook you up with a free trial so that you can see for yourself.
