The Digital Supply Chain

In its simplest sense, the supply chain is the relationship between different businesses involved in the life cycle of a product or a service.

A typical supply chain is where a retailer is reliant on the wholesaler to deliver the order; the wholesaler on the manufacturer; and the manufacturer on the delivery of the raw materials. All parties need to make the deliveries and communicate with each other for the supply chain to work.

In graphic arts (specifically print production), the picture is more complicated because we tend to deal with a lot of subcontractors. There are four different elements to this:

• Creative: where concepts and designs are created.
• Production: where the different creative pieces are assembled.
• Prepress: where the artwork is processed for printing.
• Printing: where the ink hits the paper. And everyone depends on telecoms suppliers and couriers to make our supply chains work.

But graphic arts supply chains are more complex than even this suggests. Take magazines and newspapers for example. In addition to the editorial created and produced by the publisher, advertising also has to be included before the pages are produced, processed through prepress and printed. Advertising has its own creative, production and prepress processes performed by a number of independent parties before the ad can be inserted into the publication. No one party in the chain controls all the processes and yet they have to be synchronized, as well as optimized individually. Multiply this by the number of ads in a typical publication, combined with the need to track bookings and insertion orders as well as the ads themselves, and it is obvious how complex this supply chain is.

Graphic Arts Supply Chain Puzzles: The Issues

• Designers re-use existing, possibly out-of-date content.
• Working with unclear instructions.
• Printed and distributed for proofing and approval using varied software to create artwork can be incompatible with “downstream” processes.
• Advertising specs change without notice.
• Bad files are supplied by your customers (advertisers, agencies, publishers).
• Bad files are supplied by your customers (advertisers, agencies, publishers).
• Limited knowledge by any party what happens to their files when they leave them.
• Little control over the files submitted to you as a publisher or printer.
• Job data (production and print details) are often re-typed into successive systems - this is prone to error at any stage.
• increased manpower, time and therefore cost is required to try and correct these mistakes. And sometimes add to them!

The Digital Supply Chain: The Solution

the Vio solution is simple - and that’s its beauty. we remove the guesswork and eliminate the gaps between the processes - ensuring harmony and a highly cost effective collaboration:

• Ensuring that the correct content is used in the first instance of the creative process.
• Shorter lead times required.
• Shorter proofing cycles.
• Production process metadata kept with the job from beginning to end, understood by all parties in the process.
• Production, prepress and printing metadata being linked with commercial metadata from estimating, booking, tracking and billing systems.
• Print and/or advertising specs available, issued and followed and error-free files produced, checked, approved, submitted and tracked effortlessly.
• 24/7 flexible and secure managed telecoms networking between internal processes, and with those of your supply chain partners.