Industry trends

To reduce turnaround times, you need to review the full process, from getting customer requests, managing files, printing, maintenance, finishing and delivering. Once you understand your process, you can usually find elements at almost every stage which are possible to streamline and accelerate. In many cases, this involves increased digitization.
 
Providers have switched to having clients not only providing the raw files digitally, many now also ask their clients to work remotely with staff to optimize the job pre-print. Colleagues also work remotely with each other, in order to observe social distancing.
 
One key element to accelerating your workflows and cutting turnaround time, is to build on this digitization. Client workflows are one part of this. And in many cases, they were already digitized, if not always as streamlined and automated as they could be.
 
The other part is the work of colleagues operating, optimizing and maintaining the large-format printing process. Ideally, colleagues should be able to monitor the print process remotely, so that they can quickly intervene if necessary.
 
At the same time, the mechanics of the printer matter too. It matters whether features such as print head, media-handling mechanisms and even cleaning cycles are optimized to work at the fastest possible speeds. It should also be fast, hassle-free and simple to carry out physical maintenance such as changing printheads or restocking media.