No more struggling with using multiple printers
McGowans Print is a multifaceted printing company that uses a lot of different printers. They print outdoor posters, business cards, floor units, wallpapers, booklets, brochures and basically everything else you can think of. They’ve got a Landa for nanographic printing, a Nozomi for wide format printing, a printer that runs Skodix and so many more.
All of these machines print differently and require the files to arrive in different ways. That’s why McGowans Print uses Switch, the only tool that allows them the flexibility to connect everything with everything. With Switch, when they upload an order that has to be sent to multiple printers, they no longer have to manually change the file for each printer’s specific settings. Switch does it for them.
“Currently we could be running anywhere from 200 up to 300 jobs a day through Switch to service all of our machines. Switch gives us the option to print on every machine that goes through Switch, there’s no drop-in hot folders or anything like that.”
Graham Clarke, Prepress Specialist at McGowans Print
A master workflow
At McGowans Print, they have one Switch workflow that does about 90% of their day-to-day file processing which they call their ‘master workflow’. They also have a range of other Switch workflows for very specific tasks that aren’t regularly needed. With this setup, processing a job really is as easy as dropping the file into Switch, selecting what you need to be done with the file, and letting Switch’s automation take care of everything else.
“Within our Master workflow we have 24 to 30 different elements and Switch is doing something different in each one. One has Phoenix automated imposition, one has a GMG color management system and another one has automated preflight. There are all sorts of different ones.”
Graham Clarke, Prepress Specialist at McGowans Print
Dealing with problems
In the past, the people at McGowans Print would spend hours dealing with problems that arose in the jobs they got. Identifying the problem took a lot of time and solving it took even longer. But those issues are now things of the past, as Switch detects the problems and solves most of them automatically. For the issues Switch can’t fix, it generates a report that is automatically sent to the customer. And while the customer is fixing their file, McGowans is already dropping the next job into Switch.
“Switch just looks after that without you even knowing. Just by dropping the file into it, it goes through preflight and Switch deals with the problems. I haven’t got a timer on it, but I know it would take a hell of a lot of time to preflight all the files if we didn’t have Switch.”
Graham Clarke, Prepress Specialist at McGowans Print
