There is a word that is sometimes overused, but is a fitting description of someone who is not content to let context shape them, rather their passion is to shape the context. That word is ‘visionary’.
Chris Knighton is t he PSP Global Head of Sales for HP GSB Solutions, but that title does not fully appreciate how he and his team identified perhaps the single biggest challenge facing print-service-providers (PSPs) today and then strove to develop a business growth platform that could solve it.
“We founded OneFlow Systems because of a long held passion for creating solutions to fundamental challenges facing businesses that have the talent and passion to grow, but not always the tools to enable them,” says Chris, who continues: “Site Flow came out of that drive, and we had such success with it that HP felt it could be transformational for the global print industry and so acquired us in 2019.”
The challenge in question is how print-service-providers (PSPs) faced with a nearly static market size, and a rapidly evolving demand profile, could break out of the stalemate to increase their profitability and long-term business prospects.
“I now have a team that is responsible for working with PSPs world-wide to help increase their growth by delivering solutions that enable them to produce more efficiently, increase their productivity — and most importantly — connect them to a global market place of print buyers through a reliable cloud-based platform.”
The acid test
For Chris it is all about results, not sales rhetoric or blue sky thinking, and that is why HP Site Flow has stood the acid test with none other than UK print success story Prime Group — with its Operations Director Adrian Tolley describing it as “genius”.
He continues: “Site Flow has made it easier for us to onboard customers and provide customers faster production, processing, and delivery time.”
HP Site Flow enables users to handle hundreds to thousands of orders every day, and with its end-to-end workflow automation architecture, it is ideal for managing high quantities of low item counts from order ingest, all the way to shipping and reporting. This is a critical strength in today’s marketplace driven by demand for just-in-time, highly personalised print.
Chris continues: “The key is that HP Site Flow is printer agnostic. Of course, we have the deepest integration with our own kit, but you do not need a single HP device to use it. Automated workflows that optimise your production setup and utilise more of your current investments are key to being profitable in today’s print industry. Waste reduction also needs to be relentlessly pursued and there can be very little interruption when it comes to implementing such technology.
“As such, you can set-up your HP Site Flow account in hours not weeks, using APIs and SDKs. Or create a custom ordering webpage with the HP Site Flow Printstore.”
“Another key facet of the system is you can truly conquer any volume with fully automated, dynamic scheduling to handle variable SLAs or seasonality, and even trigger reprints automatically.”
In addition, HP Site Flow offers one, customizable platform to integrate easily with existing systems from ordering, MIS, ERP, billing, and shipping, to custom, home-grown systems. The ease of integration, cloud-scalability and pay-as-you-use pricing allows PSPs to “grow without adding infrastructure or additional headcount.”
Chris adds: “When you have run a complex business, you know that it is often down to split second decisions on a job that create the difference between profit and loss.
“As such, HP Site Flow also allows you to create reports and custom dashboards that provide you with the information you need instantly and, often without human interaction, to make those choices while identifying bottlenecks that could trip you up.”
HP Site Flow also delivers its operational efficiency by automating a greater degree of complex, tedious file preparation tasks than standard systems. It also optimises pre-flighting with the aim of reducing turnaround times and input costs. Dynamic, automated scheduling and batching also keeps presses running for longer and reduces downtime.
Then when it comes to finishing and shipping, HP Site Flow will track and automate each product’s step through barcodes and station displays, consolidate items to reduce costs, and even automatically produce shipping labels, export documents and invoices. It does this cleverly by integrating with a vast number of shipping carriers from the likes of DHL, FEDEX, and UPS — to name only a few major logistics organisations.
Long-term projections
Chris continues: “The shift to online ordering has ramped up significantly across all fields in recent years. So, we need to give PSPs the tools to connect with the world, via an API. They can just plug in and access a greater, more varied pool of work than would otherwise be possible through their regionally or nationally focused outbound sales activity.
“There are more than 600 major brands connected to our platform worldwide, and they face their own challenges regarding how fast they can scale their businesses. What HP Site Flow does for them is to reduce the risk and time of integrating with such platforms in order to manage their local and global supply chains. We are onboarding more every day, and that is because this system frees them up to focus their teams on delivering value to their customers instead of being bogged down in point-to-point integrations.”
He concludes: “The scale of how HP Site Flow is used goes from small family print businesses doing a couple hundred orders a week, through to those megaliths doing 80,000 orders per day.
“That is a key strength, HP Site Flow lends itself to scaling, so you do not have to keep reinvesting and restructuring your software architecture as you grow. Secondly, for those businesses with very significant peaks and troughs in order volumes, it is designed to cope with it.”
There are two levels of HP Site Flow that you can engage with. Its Light version allows PSPs to take their first steps to receiving digital orders and is free for a limited period to support businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, with HP Site Flow Light, you get HP Brand Centre to seamlessly and intelligently outsource orders to any print service provider. The HP Site Flow Pro and Enterprise versions allow you to fully automate and integrate production and scale up usage as need requires.
