Completing custom jobs
The Decal Source is a wide format printing company that has several large commercial customers, including all the major motor sports series in the USA. But they started small. In the early days, most of the print files they received were custom jobs, those custom jobs had errors, and those errors combined with time-pressure led to jobs being printed with mistakes. Then The Decal Source discovered Switch. Soon they were able to create workflows to catch all the common file errors so that today, when they encounter a similar job, they run it through Switch and the problems are automatically fixed or flagged for manual review. This, in turn, allows them to take on more jobs than ever before.
“When you’re moving 40 orders through production daily and those 40 orders consist of over thousands of different decals that are custom, it can become challenging and frustrating. Once we found Switch and solved the problem we were trying to solve, it opened up a whole new world to us that we had never seen before.”
Anton Justad, president of The Decal Source
Using Switch to grow
After starting with Switch, The Decal Source saw double digit growth. This led to them hiring more people and buying new equipment, which they could also automate with Switch. Their production also grew tremendously, both in terms of size and in terms of speed. Now, customers can have their order delivered to them the next day, if they are willing to pay for overnight shipping of course.
“Having Switch during that growth period, we were able to keep down the amount of mistakes and reworks and just produce a large volume of work in a short period of time. Switch was a big part of that, definitely automating start to finish.”
Anton Justad, President of The Decal Source
Reducing errors
The Decal Source went from a manual process to running about 90% of all items through Switch. During the manual process they’d have to open the jobs, bring them in, size them up, set the quantity and do all of this separately for every single file. Now that they have Switch in the center of their workflow, they can drop all of the files at once and Switch will check them all for issues and then route them to the correct printing machines.
“What once took hours to prep, now takes minutes. Switch has improved that a lot for us.”
Anton Justad, President of The Decal Source
Using PitStop Pro Action Lists
The Decal Source have also been able to automate certain tasks on the back end by using PitStop Pro Action Lists. One example they give is an order they received for life-size cutouts of Nascar drivers. Normally it would take them about 30 minutes to manually cut the driver out of the image. The key here is that they had more than 10 different drivers they needed to cut out, which could easily take up half a day if they wanted to do it accurately. Now they simply use the image trace feature in one of their PitStop Action Lists, and this saves an incredible amount of time.
“Now I’m able to run it through PitStop and I’m good to go within 5 minutes. It saved me a whole day’s worth of work. So you’ve gone from 8 hours to maybe 20 minutes of work.”
Grant Meeker, Art Director at The Decal Source
Innovating with Switch
Using Switch has opened up a world of possibilities for The Decal Source. Thanks to Switch they can put a custom label on every decal they make. When they drop the JDF file into a specific hot folder, it creates a data set. Within that data set they can pull out all the variables they need for their custom labels. It shows the work order number, the specific finishing process, the quantity, whether or not it has to get laminated and so much more. This tells their production team exactly what they have in front of them and what they have to do with it.
“That label was a huge part of our being able to have as much growth as we did. It’s a very unique individual piece of information that’s specific to that one detail, that point in time and that specific order.”
Anton Justad, President of The Decal Source
You don’t need to be a coding wizard to use Switch
Anton Justad, founder of The Decal Source, went to business school and has no background in coding. But with Switch, when he encountered problem files, he was able to fix them by writing scripts. Later, he found it easy to repurpose those scripts in Switch and has been able to modify them to meet many different challenges. Those are the scripts they still use every day.
“It doesn’t require a background in coding to go into Switch and make a change to a variable or to a Switch flow. That was one of the things that really drew me towards Switch and has been really beneficial to us.”
Anton Justad, President of The Decal Source
