How to define printing intelligence, worth thinking about

Smart printing began a few years ago when the government began to promote "Made in China 2025", when the media often reported unmanned factories and unmanned stores; Alibaba AI designer Lu Ban, who can design 800 web banners per second; The video of Amazon's warehouse is even better, with an AGV-Automatic Guided Vehicle zipping through a warehouse the size of several basketball courts, each cabinet moving back and forth on its own like a robot, and the car coming into position to catch a box rolling off the top of a cabinet shelf. Then continue to move to the next shelf to pick up another bag, unmanned storage is really spectacular; The news that Alphago defeated the Go master made the public more impressed by "artificial intelligence".

How to deal with the market environment and challenges

Printing intelligence is the banner of printing industry transformation after printing digitalization. However, the definition of intelligence seems to be somewhat vague, unlike the digital CTP replacing CTF, saving the materials and time of plate making; Unlike CIP3, which replaces manual pre-inking, it saves the printing preparation time and reduces the requirements for the qualifications of the printer.

Regarding intelligence, the problem today is that all that can be digitized has been digitized, and how can intelligence improve the management and processes that have been digitized?

The development of printing for many years, will be able to limit specifications, small batches of printing live parts, all into its highly digital management process, even so, the printing plant from the workshop can turn off the light unmanned factory there is a big gap. It can be said that even if the digital printing plant is very strong, every production process also needs manpower.

Obviously, thinking of intelligent printing as an unmanned factory is not in line with reality, so how should we outline the model of intelligent printing and evaluate the reasonable direction of intelligent development?

In fact, intelligence is just a noun, how to deal with the future market environment and challenges, is the focus.

In early 2020, the epidemic hit the world, all kinds of stores and restaurants were closed, and all the planned goods were stuck in the warehouse by the virus. The mountain does not turn to the road, the CEO of the big retail industry will be hard to move the store into the broadcast room, neither fans nor jokes, in front of the camera began to sell up.

These executives best understand the psychology and needs of their customers. Red Star Macalline is a home decoration hypermarket, of which five presidents jointly broadcast, attracting 1.1272 million viewers, beating most of the big name network red, among the top ten Taobao live. Chen Xiaodong, CEO of Intime Commercial cloud department store, streamed the video for four hours, attracting 220,000 spectators. Sun Laicun is the CEO of Lin Qingxuan camellia skin oil, and the first live broadcast attracted more than 60,000 people to watch and sold 400,000 yuan of goods, equivalent to the company's four stores in a month. Suning Shopping is a large electrical appliance hypermarket extended into a comprehensive e-commerce with many stores, Shanghai general manager Xu Hailan and Haier Shanghai general manager Li Jikun live together, unexpectedly, sales results actually exceeded 3.5 million yuan. Affected by the impact, Suning salesmen in various regions followed by the opening of hundreds of broadcast rooms, so there were many cloud cabinet sister, cloud younger brother to live with goods instead of standing in front of the counter to promote the phenomenon.

Today, people wear masks to go shopping, maintain social distancing to buy things, retail business has long changed to a new way, retail is the downstream of the printing industry, the environment has changed the downstream business model, upstream suppliers do not change.

Printing intelligence must face this environment, not to live, but to use the benefits of mobile networks to string together the printing supply chain.

Three examples to answer What is printing supply chain

Mobile phone brands such as Huawei, Apple do not have their own manufacturing workshop, they only control the quality specifications, drive the world's most suitable parts, assembly, testing OEM suppliers, to actually complete the manufacturing of mobile phones.

Can you do the same with printing?

Example 1:

There is a Taiwan printer, in order to solve the dilemma of mature industry business difficult to do, invested in the purchase of ERP, the enterprise's service is defined as a piece of goods, displayed on the web page, all the goods are linked to the background database, modify any data, web pages, accounting bills, warehouse lists... The data under the same subject are updated. From the receipt of any order to the delivery of production and shipment, the relevant data are updated in the ERP process management.

Taiwan's combination printing plant provides a variety of print foundry services. The enterprise will display the appropriate products on the company's web page, receive the order, ERP automatically issues the order information to the printing plant, and then the customer can receive the goods, which is equivalent to having "their own printing workshop". After the normalization of business, the importance of salesmen is reduced, only a few employees are responsible for production, and most employees handle shipments, compared with the original business, much easier.

Like all retail bosses, the printing shop owner, whose job has become easier, soon wants to open another branch. The problem is that a printing website can receive orders from all over Taiwan, and there is no reason to open a second branch.

Example 2:

A friend who came back from South Africa mentioned that the price of a box of business cards in South Africa was four or five times that of Taiwan. So there's MediaWork Web Printing (http://www.media-works.co.za/) in South Africa, with a single, lightweight digital press in its shop. 60% of its prints are flown in from a combination printer in Taiwan. In just three years, MediaWork's revenues surpass those of its parent company in Taiwan.

MediaWork's ERP is the English version of the parent company, which is also in the cloud and the data process is the same as that of the parent company. Some of MediaWork's units are produced locally in South Africa, while others are flown in from Taiwan.

From a macro perspective, intelligence is the use of the network to string together the supply chain, order, production, delivery... Not limited to location, to the most efficient unit

Example 3:

On the day of the unsealing of Wuhan, the Hulu Wa printing supply chain platform launched a marketing campaign to provide 1 million DIY photo books for the national graphic advertising industry free of charge, and each store is limited to 1,000 books. This is not just a marketing advertisement, but a demonstration that photo books can be delivered cheaply and efficiently across the country.

What's the mystery? And look at the whole business process of gourd baby.

Users select photos through the wechat mini program, which is automatically arranged into 24 pages, and pay directly after the layout is determined. After that, the document is sent to the cloud platform, according to the designed size (let's say B2+, the size is determined by the digital printer), intelligent software in B2+ size of the large version, and then according to the delivery point of the order, to the local digital output center, finally, on the machine printing, cutting, binding into a book. The express barcode was printed on the back cover of the photo book at the time of printing. Such a process only requires that the platform has a digital printing store in a region with OEM cooperation, and the delivery can be limited.

The design of this photo book starts with thinking about the format of the digital printing press at the delivery location, and then works backwards to set the page size of the photo book on the wechat mini program. This is the supply chain thinking, the design of printed goods and the supply chain is closely integrated. The information is transmitted from the user's mobile phone to the cloud server of the photo book, then to the digital printing press at the delivery location, and even the computers of the Courier company are connected, without manual intervention, as long as the information can be used to drive the computers in different supply chains step by step, you can intelligently do the photo book business.

With the advent of 5G and the Internet of Things, the efficiency of information transmission and data collection is getting higher and higher, coupled with the development of domestic mobile payment and express delivery industries. Various basic construction has long been complete, which is the main theme of the environment, and all walks of life will dance with it.

In order to meet the series of future printing supply chains, all printing plants consider intelligence, the first step is to establish an information-driven management mechanism, the management between internal departments using electronic subpoenas to replace traditional paper subpoenas; External communication with customers and supply chain partners using messages instead of wechat, mail or fax; The production process is driven by work order information, and the equipment uses MES (Production execution System) to receive management information...