In March 2022, Solopress increased sales by 16% compared with March 2019, and the company accomplished that feat with 37% fewer staff members. The team's focus on workflow and automation improvements is literally paying off.

In April 2022, Simon Cooper, managing director of UK-based online printing specialist Solopress since February 2019, presented a well-received educational session at this Dscoop event in the UK. More than 50 attendees learned from Simon as he shared details about the ways Solopress has streamlined workflow and automation during the COVID pandemic.Simon is a passionate, entrepreneurial print leader with 27 years of experience in our industry. He embraces technology, innovation and change, and he recently dedicated time for this chat about the importance of automation, advancements at his business, key take-aways from the UK event presentation and more:

Your UK event session was titled "Automating Your Way Out of a Crisis." What did you most want to convey to the audience?

During the pandemic we experienced a significant revenue drop compared to 2019, and there was a period of scrambling to ensure survival. We worried a bit about cash and tried to reduce the cost base, knowing there wasn't much we could do to stimulate demand while everyone was locked away in their homes. But then we recognized there were some opportunities to pivot with the products we offered, including 30 or 40 products that were COVID-specific like hand sanitizer, dispenser stations, face masks, partition screens and floor vinyl. That helped a little bit, but didn't make the difference we really needed.

At the time we wanted to invest in high-speed inkjet. We still wanted to do that, but we weren't sure if we should keep pushing ahead with innovation that we knew would ultimately lead to an increase in productivity for the business, at a time when demand was so low. We made the decision to push ahead, which was going to be a big change for our business.At the event here in the UK, I wanted to share our experience with automation improvement during a time of instability. During the pandemic, our workforce reduced from 308 people to 150. We're back up to 193 now, but we've been through quite an experience. Fortunately, we've come out of the crisis stronger in many ways because we pushed ahead to revolutionize the business.

Did Solopress use unexpected downtime caused by COVID to focus on improving workflow and automation?

That's definitely right, yes. That's why we ultimately decide d to push ahead with the high-speed inkjet innovation that we knew would be good for us long-term. Making such a big change that fundamentally altered the way we manufacture goods is difficult to do when you're up against it. We were 60% down for a long time, and running at less than half capacity. When we added the inkjet capability, it turns out we really needed extra time because it wasn't plug-and-play. We needed the time to get good at it and perfect it. The fact that our workload had dropped gave us the breathing space to make some big improvements. We had headspace for those improvements that normally we wouldn't have had.

At the time, what was the company's approach to workflow?

From a workflow point of view, we had to figure out how to get lots of orders together, aggregate them and produce them in a linear process as opposed to a sheet-fed process. Our litho production was fairly automated because we were used to printing those multiple jobs together, but our digital workflow wasn't really slick. It was quite time-consuming, which is OK on orders of a couple hundred, but for orders of 10, you can spend more time fiddling around with jobs than you do actually producing them. We didn't have anything in the business that would help us come to grips with creating a batch of lots of different types of orders in a seamless way.

What did your team do to improve digital production, and how does digital fit into Solopress' business overall?

We took HP's Site Flow product and integrated it with our own workflow system we had previously developed in-house. We also rely on the Enfocus Switch print automation platform and the EFI Metrix planning and imposition software. For us, Site Flow creates those printing batches that go through to the digital presses. Broadly speaking, before the pandemic our press configuration was eight litho presses and seven iGen digital presses. The press configuration now is four litho presses, four HP Indigo presses and one inkjet press. That's quite a big change. Today, 48% of our revenue is generated from litho, 36% is from digital, 13% is large-format and 3% is stuff we outsource like merchandising products.

How you envision those percentages to change in the near future?

I really don't know, but honestly there is still a lot of volume to go after on the litho/offset side. The business is ever-changing and evolving, and one thing we've seen that's been a marked change since the pandemic is our average order values have increased from about 55 pounds to 85 pounds, and our average run lengths have increased. We've gotten better at producing digital work than before, but we're starting to win more of the longer-length work. I guess we have to look at macro factors, and one of those trends as trust in our brand develops, we've found that customers are more willing to place higher-value orders through our e-commerce site.Another change is that prices are increasing. We're generally cheaper because we've got some scale, we do some job aggregation, we're pretty slick with automation, and we also have an e-commerce site that reduces some need on the administration side. So as prices go up and customers notice and become more price-sensitive, we might just be winning on that. So it remains to be seen about where we'll be in the future, because our business dynamics might be separate from some shorter-term things that are happening in the market.

When you look at productivity at your company, what do you measure?

The main productivity measures we look at are the area we produce per hour worked, revenue we create per hour worked in the business and number of jobs produced per hour worked. When we look at the area produce per hour worked now compared with 2019, we're 66% up. Revenue created per hour worked is 41% up. In March 2022, we increased sales by 16% compared with March 2019, but we did that with 37% less staff. The productivity in our business has completely changed to a different scale.

That's an incredible achievement. Congratulations, Simon, and we wish you continued success at Solopress!

Thank you!