The estimate lives in the MIS. The job ticket is a printout or a PDF. The press schedule is a whiteboard, a spreadsheet or someone's head. Each system is fine on its own. The trouble is the gaps between them, and the people who fill those gaps by typing the same information again.
The industry is still half manual
GelatoConnect's State of Intelligent Print Production 2026 report, based on a global survey of print service providers in early 2026, found that 70% describe their production as a mix of manual and automated processes. Only 9% said they had reached a highly optimised state. 44% named integration challenges as a barrier, and 39% had automated less than a quarter of their workflow from order intake to dispatch.
The picture was similar in the Enfocus Workflow Automation Report in 2019, where 43% of North American printers said their processes were completely or mostly manual across more than one department. Progress has been slow because joining systems up is harder than buying them.
What re-keying really costs
Every time job data is typed again, three things happen:
- Time is spent on work that adds nothing for the customer.
- Errors creep in. A quantity, a stock, a finishing option or a delivery date gets copied wrongly, and nobody notices until the job is on press or on the van.
- Nobody has the full picture. When status lives in several places, the honest answer to "where is my job?" is "let me go and find out".
The cost rarely shows up as a single line in the accounts. It shows up as overtime, remakes, credit notes and customer service staff spending their day on the phone.
What "talking to production" actually means
A connected workflow does not need to be a giant project. In practice it means:
- The job is created once, in the MIS, and its details travel with the files.
- Preflight, imposition and press setup read those details rather than relying on someone to type them in.
- Status comes back automatically, so the MIS knows when a file has passed, been proofed, approved, printed and finished.
Most modern MIS platforms expose job data through JDF and JMF, XML job tickets or an API. Workflow tools such as Enfocus Switch sit in the middle, pick up the data and files, and pass the right information to the right system at the right time.
Start with one connection
You do not have to connect everything at once. Pick the handoff that causes the most re-keying or the most mistakes, often order intake to prepress, and automate that first. Measure the time and errors before and after. The second connection is easier, because the first one proves the case.
// how we can help
We connect your MIS, web to print, prepress and press systems so job data is entered once and status flows back on its own.
Also useful: Workflow audit
Sources: Print service providers say they must modernise (GelatoConnect, State of Intelligent Print Production 2026); Enfocus Workflow Automation Report, October 2019.