When Emmanuel Branger set up his print business, 28.03 Le Studio, in 2008, he had a clear idea in mind about how to succeed. Print was already cutthroat, and he was establishing a small, “artisanal” operation. The big players in the print space were already investing huge sums of money in rapid automation, and prices were hitting rock bottom. So, how did this small player plan to thrive in this marketplace?
A Meeting of Minds
David and Goliath. It's a story that has been told and retold for generations, and for good reason. It's a tale of the underdog triumphing against all odds. And it's a story that is particularly relevant in the world of business, where small businesses often compete against larger rivals.
But what if there was a way for small businesses to level the playing field? What if they could gain an edge by using automation to streamline their workflow?
Emmanuel Branger had been to Drupa in 2008. There, he’d first seen Enfocus Switch in action, and it sent his mind racing.
It seemed this one-stop automation tool could do almost anything. It would be able to streamline and improve operations in any size of business.
Emmanuel had been thinking about the “flow” in workflow for some time. Incredible digital print and finishing technologies were available that could handle any volume of work he threw at them.
But for an artisanal outfit like he was considering establishing, throughput was going to be a major limiting factor.
The problem was upstream. There were too many manual touchpoints causing bottlenecks: Job reception; Customer interactions; Job preparation and preflight. That’s where the flow was missing.
If you don’t have flow—fluidity—you can’t make ends meet. It’s that simple. The print tech is in place. Today, we have printers that print quickly, machines that cut quickly, but if there is no flow of jobs, they’re no use.
With Enfocus Switch, he was convinced he’d found the missing piece he was looking for. He decided to leave his offset partners behind and go it alone with 28.03 Le Studio.
Survival Tools
The bottom line for Emmanuel was he needed an automation tool for 28.03 Le Studio that could make it competitive and profitable. To do this, the solution would need to handle as many manual, repetitive tasks as possible.
The solution also needed to be affordable to a small business.
He saw immediately that Enfocus Switch provided possibilities that he could develop over time. He would be able to get up and running progressively with automation on his own and wouldn’t need teams of expensive integrators or support contracts.
I build my flow on a piece of paper and I can do it this way because building the flow is like architecture. First the blueprint, then you build the flow. Switch has no limits and I love it. It integrates with systems already in place, and runs third-party applications to accelerate flow, avoid errors, and automate repetitive tasks.
28.03 Le Studio’s First Employee
In 2008, when Emmanuel set up 28.03 Le Studio in Saint-Denis on the edge of the French capital, his first employee ran on electricity, not coffee.
A few months after Drupa, I made the decision to restart in business on my own. And my first employee was Switch.
Since then, Emmanuel has added a second—human—employee. Enfocus Switch is now indispensable to them both:
There are only two of us, and we have enormous production peaks, which we manage to absorb using Switch.
When asked about the benefits Enfocus Switch brings to 28.03 Le Studio, Emmanuel has to pick from a long list.
Switch immediately freed up time for higher-value work by eliminating repetitive manual tasks. It also increases the quantity of print jobs we’re able to process [...] Switch can provide us with information in real time. We are notified when the customer drops off a file (via FTP), and we know which customer it was. By the time we get to it, it has already been transferred and has been checked and deposited on our server if it passes the tests.
Easy Integration… and Learning Curve
As soon as Emmanuel started working with Enfocus Switch, he was hooked. He was able to start automating aspects of his business within hours. With an intuitive drag and drop interface, he found it easy to learn the software and was quickly able to give it a role automating his business, tech and production stacks.
In no time, his “employee” was sending automated emails, receiving notifications, downloading files, preflighting and routing jobs, running quality and format checks on jobs, archiving files, and more.
Enfocus Switch is well known for being able to automate almost any aspect of a print production workflow, from automatically adding grommet holes on wide format to providing foolproof PDF quality control. And Emmanuel is happily—and profitably—embracing more possibilities all the time as his knowledge of the software grows.
The Bottom Line
There’s good news from Emmanuel. Business is booming at 28.03 Le Studio, and because Enfocus Switch has freed up time for higher-value work, profit is good:
Financial savings are closely linked to time savings: I save money when I save time. And in this profession, I am selling time.
Asked about the value brought by his first “employee”, Emmanuel remains effusive.
Without Switch, 28.03 Le Studio wouldn’t be able to print enough jobs or I would print them fast but badly. Today, all printers on the market have almost the same print cost. On the other hand, when you enter an upstream order then have to spend 20 minutes opening a PDF, checking it, checking the RGB images, all your margin is lost there. With Enfocus Switch, we save a lot of time, print well, and see healthy margins.
In today's competitive business landscape, it is more important than ever for small businesses to find ways to level the playing field. Automation is an invaluable tool in this regard, and Enfocus Switch is the most affordable, easy to get started with, and infinitely adaptable automation tool on the market.
