Photo courtesy of Work House Signs owner and President Rob Cole.
Printer finds more time for other “important” activities
With the extra time, improved morale, and ‘lights-out’ automation from Significans Automation, Cole and his team at Work House Signs now have more time to indulge in another passion – playing golf – often using Significans-branded golf balls. 
Pennsylvania online signage printer reduces 3,024 hours of job processing to just 6 hours with highly customized, AI-driven workflow solutions from Significans Automation. This has freed up employee time for… other “important” activities!
Work House Signs (Pottstown, Pennsylvania), a leading U.S. online sign printer, produces thousands of high-quality signs each week with a multi-talented staff of only 8 employees. It currently has a staggering 1.8 million designs listed for sale on 5 different platforms – Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Etsy, and its own website. This business model has made it one of the most successful online sellers of signage in North America.
But there were major challenges along the way. “Designing our own signs and printing and cutting them in-house was a very manual process,” recalls President and owner Rob Cole. “And though we had great success with it, to continue growing our business we needed to post as many product listings as possible online, which we were also doing in a very manual and time-consuming way.”
Ultimately, the company reached a huge bottleneck. It couldn’t list any more products in bulk because employees were spending virtually all their time manually managing the orders that were coming in. So rather than hire new employees, in February of 2024, Cole contacted Significans Automation. Led by V.P. of Technology Sean Davis, the Significans team deployed a combination of Enfocus Switch, PitStop, and Phoenix software to integrate with the company’s Shopify orders, which were delivered using ShipStation software. The objective was to remove human touchpoints and reduce repetitive tasks through seamless automation.
The AI tool Fuzzy Matcher was also deployed. This artificial intelligence and machine-learning technology identifies similar, but not identical, elements in large sets of data. In this case, it helped to drastically reduce the time required to search the more than 500,000 sign options available on the company’s 5 online platforms.
38,000 signs processed in one evening and constant monitoring
“The new, customized software ultimately led to a major freeing up of labor, so we could focus on growing the business rather than maintaining it,” said Cole. “Since then, we’ve made huge strides partnering with Significans Automation. With the new technology, for example, we recently created 38,000 signs in just one evening! That would have previously taken us about 4 months. Eventually, this will allow us to boost sales tenfold.” In other words, 3,024 hours (4 months) of job processing was reduced to just 6 hours!
“Essentially, the highly customized software we deployed is checking for new orders awaiting shipment every five minutes,” said Davis. “Plus, when those orders arrive, there could be multiple items within one order to process. So, we could be processing literally hundreds of orders and combinations per day.”
As an example, let’s say a specific yard sign is requested online. The company has dozens of variations of that particular sign available as pre-designed templates on its 5 storefronts, with varying file names. If an exact match doesn’t exist, which is unlikely, the Fuzzy Matcher app will access the closest match. Once approved, it will automatically send the file into the workflow, impose the file, sort it into the appropriate folder by date, and then get it ready for ripping. This new, customized workflow is 100% automated, resulting in “astronomical” time savings.
Previously, staffers would have to sort through hundreds and even thousands of these templates when an order came in, and scroll through a seemingly endless list of files to find where this template was located. Now, in less than five seconds, the new system automatically searches those thousands of files, finds an approximate match, pulls that template, and then pushes it forward within the reconfigured workflow. Plus, the new solution automatically checks incoming orders every 5 minutes!
For more information, please visit Work House Signs or find them on Amazon, Walmart, eBay, or Etsy.
For an assessment of your workflow software systems, please call Significans Automation at 1-877-463-4465 or contact us. You’ll be directed not to a salesperson or a third party but to one of our regional workflow automation and integration experts, who has years of production-floor experience.
