E-business Solution for Printers Debuts

Staff -- Graphic Arts Online, 11/1/2000

Printable.com has created a way for printers to offer on-line, customized printing services. Called PrintFusion, the new system helps simplify and streamline the process of creating, ordering, proofing, and processing customized printing jobs composed of arbitrarily rich single-page documents.

"Over the past few years, many printers have watched their market share erode as customized printing jobs have been taken away by small-job shops and on-line quick-print services," says Printable.com president and chief executive Stuart Clifton. "PrintFusion gives these printers the power to stop this trend and recapture this segment of their market."

Printers access PrintFusion through Printable.com's Printer's Dashboard, an e-business control panel designed exclusively for printers. Through the Printer's Dashboard, printers can access numerous integrated Internet services including order placement, file archive, preflight services, portfolio management, personalized catalogs for key customers, and customer center administration.

Print buyers access PrintFusion via a PrintOne Web site, which is a customized and password-protected on-line customer care center provided to print buyers by printers. When a print buyer needs to reorder a job such as a data sheet that requires an update, the buyer launches the PrintOne site and selects the appropriate PrintFusion template from the company's individual catalog of print jobs.

Using a Web page created by PrintFusion, the print buyer enters the customized data, which is automatically flowed into the layout following preset copyfitting parameters. Once this automated process is complete, an on-line proof is produced immediately for client review.