Automation Spurs Unprecedented Efficiency While Boosting Employee Morale and Growth
Prepress kitting reduced from one full day to just 30 minutes, daily throughput cut from more than 40 hours to approximately two hours, and ROI achieved in around 90 days.
Family-Owned Commercial Printer Achieves Major Productivity Gains with Significans Automation
When Wallace Graphics, based in Duluth, Georgia, partnered with Significans Automation to transform its production workflow through highly customized automation and integration – the result saw dramatic improvements in throughput, production efficiency, employee satisfaction, and long-term scalability.
Founded in 1987 as a one-man commercial print operation, Wallace Graphics has grown into a second-generation, family-owned business offering digital, offset and large-format printing, direct mail services, fulfillment, promotional products, printed apparel, and more. As the business expanded, so did the complexity of its production environment, creating increasing pressure on both systems and staff.
Growth Created New Workflow Challenges
Over the years, Wallace Graphics successfully expanded into mailing and fulfillment, acquired a wide-format printing business, and later added promotional products and printed apparel to its portfolio.
While this growth opened new opportunities, it also introduced significant operational challenges.
Manual production processes were becoming bottlenecks that limited throughput, increased production risk, and placed growing pressure on the prepress team.
“We were processing jobs through customer service and prepress using mostly manual steps. This made it almost impossible to increase our throughput, especially when a large volume of jobs arrived at the same time. We needed an ultra-efficient workflow that could increase capacity while reducing mistakes and improving responsiveness to our customers.”
– Anthony Guice, Director of Technical Operations
Enter Significans Automation
Wallace Graphics partnered with Significans Automation to design and deploy a fully customized workflow tailored to its production environment.
The implementation combined:
- Enfocus Switch
- Enfocus PitStop
- Enfocus Phoenix
- Enfocus PDF Review
- Custom scripting
- XML Toolkit
- Enfocus App Store applications
Together, these technologies automated and connected critical production processes while integrating seamlessly with Wallace Graphics’ existing systems.
Automation was introduced across multiple areas including:
- Direct mail order entry
- Customer file intake
- Automated preflight and proofing
- Print file production
- Email parsing
- Work-in-progress folder creation
- Material planning and ganging
- MIS integration
- Customer data processing
One of the most significant improvements came from redesigning the company’s prepress kitting workflow, alongside XML integrations that allowed production information to move automatically between systems without manual intervention.
Game-Changing Results
Wallace Graphics began seeing measurable improvements within the first month of deployment.
The customized workflow dramatically reduced repetitive manual work while improving production consistency, employee morale, and overall profitability.
Key results included:
- Prepress kitting reduced from one full day to approximately 30 minutes
- Daily throughput of 50 jobs reduced from more than 40 hours to around two hours
- Ten-fold increase in employee time savings
- Faster turnaround times
- Reduced production errors
- Greater production capacity without increasing headcount
- Significant improvements in employee morale
The efficiencies also enabled Wallace Graphics to invest in its first HP PageWide T2200 Press, allowing jobs to be batched more effectively while keeping production running almost continuously.
“Instead of frowns, I’m getting high fives and even hugs from our prepress team. We’ve built a lot together by partnering with Significans, but I believe we’re just getting started.”
Fast ROI and Future Growth
The impact was immediate.
“We started to see tangible, measurable results in about a month or two. We can do so much more with the staff and equipment we already have. I’m estimating we’ll recover our original investment in about 90 days – and the future looks bright.”
Today, Wallace Graphics views Significans as an extension of its own team, continuing to identify new opportunities for automation as the business grows.
As Guice puts it:
“The only restraint we have is our imagination.”
For an assessment of your workflow software systems, and to discuss your current needs and future goals, please call Significans Automation at 1-877-463-4465.
Or, e-mail Marc Raad, President, at marc.raad@significans.com.
You can also download a bitesize PDF version of the case study now.
