Cober Solutions: What 20 Years of Integration Decisions Looks Like

# Automation

# Workflow

# ECommerce

# Integration

# Strategy

# WebToPrint

# Partnerships

60 storefronts, a 9-person technology team, and a proprietary job management system they built themselves.

Erwin Driever didn't set out to build one of the industry's most sophisticated web-to-print ecosystems. More than 20 years ago, one of Cober's largest customers — a global insurance company — needed an online ordering solution and asked Cober to help bring it to life. That customer request started a journey that has since spanned multiple platforms, multiple migrations, and one consistent lesson: Everything depends on integration.

Every major technology decision has started with the same question: Will this connect cleanly to everything else we run? If the answer was no, the platform was never seriously considered. That philosophy still shapes Cober today , about eight years after adopting Infigo.

"If you can't integrate into an existing system in some form or fashion that hopefully is relatively easy, it's just not worth the effort to even look at or invest in," Erwin said.

An operation built for scale

Today, Cober runs more than 60 Infigo storefronts and 15 direct brand integrations, connecting commercial print, fulfillment, warehousing, and production into a single ecosystem. Over time, the storefront evolved from a traditional web-to-print portal into a broader e-commerce gateway supporting print-on-demand, warehousing, fulfillment, promotional products, and personalized ordering within a single workflow.

The brand integrations connect the production operation to multiple brand platforms, each with their own requirements and volumes. Each component of the business, commercial print, warehousing or fulfillment, feeds into a production operation that handles hundreds of orders a day.

The automation level reflects that scale. Roughly 350 publications a month move through Cober's litho operation with minimal manual intervention, though they still account for only about 75–80% of total litho volume. Automation is even higher across the rest of the operation: Digital print, warehousing, and fulfilment orders are around 95% automated. The same infrastructure supports everything from book-of-one production to runs of tens of thousands, with routing logic determining whether jobs land on digital or litho equipment.

Erwin notes that litho average run lengths have dropped as digital volume continues to grow, and a new press was recently added to absorb that shift. "I think our average run length right now is about 2,800 sheets before we're changing plates," he said. "But because of the automation we've implemented, we can handle that and still be very profitable at it and still meet SLAs, which is the key thing right now."

Cober shows what integration infrastructure can become after two decades of deliberate investment — and the in-house capability to keep improving it.

Where the constraint moved

The bottleneck today is not the press, Erwin says. "A lot of it really comes down to finishing. It hasn't quite caught up to that variability yet."

Customers increasingly expect more variation — different sizes, finishes, substrates, and quantities — which means finishing has become one of the hardest parts of the workflow to automate. Solving the upstream automation reveals the downstream constraint. That pattern repeats at every level of operational sophistication.

Cober’s response to that complexity was to build capability in-house at a scale most operations do not reach. The technology team includes four developers, two IT staff, three people focused on e-commerce portals, and two automation specialists. That is a nine-person team dedicated to making the infrastructure work. Few PSPs invest at that level, but for Cober, building software is simply part of the business.

The most concrete expression of that investment is a proprietary job management system Cober built to track every job across all work centers. The system surfaces real-time dashboards for on-time performance, late orders, quality reprints, and rerouting. It gives the operation visibility that no off-the-shelf system provided at the level of detail the business needed. Building it reflects Cober's belief that software development is a competitive advantage.

Speed earned over time

One advantage of a mature platform like Infigo is how quickly new customer portals can move from concept to production. Combined with Cober's years of experience refining templates, integrations, and workflows, the Infigo platform allows the team to launch standard storefronts in less than a week. When products are straightforward, new portals can sometimes be live the very same day.

That speed is the result of two decades spent refining how web-to-print should work, continuously improving templates, automating repetitive tasks, and building the infrastructure needed to scale with confidence. Today, standard Infigo storefronts can be launched in less than a week, while straightforward products can sometimes be live the very same day.

Portals also generate work beyond the portal itself. Customers who trust the storefront begin bringing larger commercial projects, one-off jobs, and other work that may never pass through the portal. The relationship that starts with repeat-order catalogues gradually expands because customers have developed confidence in the broader organization. In that sense, the storefront becomes a customer-retention tool as much as an ordering tool.

Cober shows what integration infrastructure can become after two decades of deliberate investment — and the in-house capability to keep improving it. The lesson is that integration is never truly finished. The companies that keep investing in connected systems continue finding new opportunities to become faster, smarter, and easier to do business with.

Note: Check Dscoop.com's Events area for an upcoming virtual roundtable that continues the discussion presented in this series.