Wide-Format Printing Automation: How Finishing Upgrades Can Eliminate Bottlenecks and Drive Growth

READERS OF BIG PICTURE will be keenly aware of the rapid growth that the wide-format print market has seen over the past few years, both in the U.S. and around the world. The North American printed signage market is forecast to continue a growth trajectory of 3.72% through 2029, according to research from Research and Markets. This is being driven by growing demand from the retail sector, expansion in outdoor advertising, and the ever-present need for brands to differentiate themselves.

Alongside this growth, however, have come many challenges that also will be only too familiar to most wide-format print shops. Many of today’s wide-format print buyers are in constant motion as they move to respond swiftly to fleeting trends and shifting consumer preferences. As a result, the pressure for ever-faster turnarounds is relentless, while at the same time wide-format print businesses seem to be handling more low volume-job lots than ever before. Simultaneously, the industry is facing unprecedented skill and labor shortages. It seems that everywhere you turn, businesses are trying to do more with less.

As the wide-format print sector has grown and matured, much emphasis in research and development has been in the areas of prepress and printing itself. As a result, however, many other aspects of the wide-format print shop have been outpaced to the point where factors such as media handling between jobs and finishing of jobs often can
become unseen bottlenecks that slow down overall production times, demand disproportionate amounts of team member time, and reduce both capacity and profitability.

Unsurprisingly, this is an area in which many print shops stand to benefit from both investment and automation. The research agrees, with this interest in optimizing in-house workflows reflected in Big Picture’s 2024 Application and Usage Survey. It found that some 28% are planning an investment in wide-format finishing equipment
within the next two years.

If textile banners have grown as rapidly as an application for your business, you may find certain finishing tasks become a hurdle that slows down the delivery of jobs to your customers. PHOTO: PLASTGROMMET

Finishing First

You may have the fastest roll-to-roll or flatbed wide-format printer out there, but your workflow is only ever going to be as fast as your slowest point. For many wide-format print businesses, this point typically lies somewhere in the finishing department. As a result, however, this is one area of the business where a simple automation can save hours and free up capacity for new work.

Streamlining operations and reducing downtime often are recognized as obvious routes to increasing productivity and profitability. But identifying time-consuming finishing tasks that could be automated can yield even more impactful results. It seems that this is being recognized by growing numbers of wide-format print service providers, with more
than a third of respondents in Big Picture’s 2024 Application and Usage Survey having increased their investment in finishing equipment over the preceding two years.

If it is taking up a lot of valuable staff time to manually set grommets, or you’re even having to turn down work because you cannot set the grommets quickly enough, it may be time to consider an automatic grommeting machine.

Is it Time?

One of the mistakes that many businesses make is thinking they’re not “big enough” to warrant automating their workflows, or that the time lost isn’t quite sufficient to warrant investment. However, automation needn’t be an all-consuming process. In fact, for most businesses, it’s probably best to take it a step (or bottleneck) at a time.

For example, if textile banners have grown as rapidly as an application for your business, you may find certain finishing tasks are becoming a hurdle that slows down the delivery of jobs to your customers. If it is taking up a lot of valuable staff time to manually set grommets, or you’re even having to turn down work because you cannot set the grommets quickly enough, it may be time to consider an automatic grommeting machine.

A simple investment also can help you build savings in ways you’d not anticipated. Consider how you store and move your media rolls as an example. For many growing print shops this is not an area that gets much thought until they try to squeeze in a new piece of equipment. But something as simple as a different approach to racking could reduce waste due to damaged media. For example, a hydraulic roll lifter can turn a two-man job into something that safely can be handled alone, increasing shop floor safety and freeing up a team member to focus on more profitable work.

The question of when to automate will have a different answer for every business. But bottlenecks often do appear for quite similar reasons. Typically, because when a business is growing, we tend to look outward. Yet by periodically pausing to think about the way you work, and walking through the journey each type of project takes through
your print shop, you often can identify opportunities for the kinds of incremental improvements that will enable you to keep growing.

Take it Slow

Incremental changes that increase the overall efficiency and productivity of your workflow not only are about increasing profitability and capacity by dispatching work to customers faster or at a better price. Investing strategically also can enable overall business growth by changing the kinds of orders you can handle or enabling you to target a new market segment.

Investing in an automated finishing solution capable of handling welding, grommeting, and cutting, for example, undoubtedly will address banner finishing bottlenecks. But in doing so, it also could enable you to take on far larger order volumes than you’ve
previously handled and thus build more valuable long-term relationships with customers.

Some of our clients also invest in wide-format finishing automation to enable them to target a new market segment, such as making the move beyond banners to scaffolding or building wraps. Investing in any technology always should be a long-term strategic decision. But often we see businesses scrambling to address a bottleneck when it’s already become a real problem.

By thinking about the end-to-end journey of your most typical workstreams, you can begin to anticipate such problems as you notice demand growing in any particular area. When you approach automation in this way, you naturally will enable time savings and cost reductions. But in considering how it enhances your overall service offering, you also stand to turn a finishing solution into a key that unlocks growth.