For years, PageDNA has allowed our customers to control where their approved work goes. That included production prep and routing to production destinations, including outside vendors. But that’s not where the flow stops. Even after routing jobs to the right place, they still need to move through the right hands. That’s where our newest feature, Item Assignment, comes into play.
Item assignment is the new ownership layer inside PageDNA’s existing production workflow. It enables users to control who owns the next step by adding clear, trackable ownership for each item in an order.
Watch the video below to learn more:
Current Capabilities: Job Routing
PageDNA’s powerful job routing capabilities are designed to remove manual touches from your workflow and streamline processes. They allow users to route orders to different destinations in the production environment. Regardless of whether a basket contains one, five, or ten items, PageDNA can split the basket into multiple production destinations as needed.
You can also use PageDNA’s Payload manager to monitor artwork routing, ensuring that every job goes to the right place without failure.
Adding Ownership: Item Assignment
PageDNA’s long-running job routing capability answers where a job needs to go in your production environment. Item Assignment builds on top of that capability by answering who is responsible for each item at every stage of production.
Even inside a routed job, there are multiple steps where different parties hold responsibility. A job may belong first to prepress, then to the press operator, then to finishing, then to shipping.
Before, managing who was responsible for each step of the process could be complex and time-consuming. Now, you can manage both the “who” and the “where” from the same place. PageDNA users can assign items to people, roles, or stations, and move them through their workflow until they’re in the shop. With our Order Manager, assignees can see where each job stands and move work forward to the next stage.
Item Assignment at Your Print Shop
What might this look like in action? Imagine an order from a PageDNA storefront contains three different items. PageDNA routes each item to the appropriate destination and, within those routing lanes, gives you the option to assign people, stations, or roles to own each step of the process. Here’s how it would look at your print shop:
- Prepress. All three items are assigned to the prepress operator for artwork checks, setup, and approvals, as needed.
- Production. Once the items are approved, they are assigned to the appropriate press operators depending on the item type (for example, promotional items vs. color copies). Each item goes through its own set of responsible owners depending on its routing.
- Shipping. After production is finished, every item is assigned to shipping for final delivery. When they mark the job completed, customers get a shipping/delivery update – letting them know the job is on the way – the moment it is completed.
Item Assignment means every team member knows what they are responsible for as jobs move through a workflow. It provides clear accountability, reduces dropped handoffs, and allows your print shop to do more with the same team and equipment.
Benefits of Item Assignment
We’re excited to equip our users with this powerful feature, giving them more control and insight into their print production processes. Some of the biggest benefits Item Assignment can bring to your print shop include:
- Improved visibility and accountability for production owners, staff, and supervisors
- Assignees can focus on their work by filtering queues by owner
- Clearer ownership of tasks
- Work can be reassigned easily as it progresses, improving handoffs
- Fewer stalled jobs
- More output with the same team
MIS-Inspired Functionality
Item Assignment means you can manage your production process–from tracking a job through stages and owners–completely with PageDNA. We have built-in measures to ensure jobs are produced on time, such as automatic reminders if a job has been with one assignee for too long.
These capabilities are inspired by print MIS software, which is often more complex and designed for larger manufacturing and production models. PageDNA is happy to offer our customers a new level of operational control that allows for more visibility into their day-to-day workflows and job progression.
MIS Integration
PageDNA is also set up to integrate into your current MIS software, if you’re using one. We can continue to push data into your MIS or accounting programs while still harnessing these new workflow capabilities.
Item Assignment: A Real World Example
A prestigious East Coast university requested a demo from PageDNA to learn more about how we could help them manage their production workflow. The university described themselves as paper-oriented, with physical printed job tickets acting as the queue. This meant there was limited live visibility into where work sat as it moved through production.
PageDNA was able to meet the university’s strategic goals by emphasizing digital ownership, handoffs, and visibility without eliminating their existing physical workflows by supporting PDF job tickets. They were happy to see that PageDNA could handle more of the production-management visibility and workflow ownership they had previously been relying on another, aging system for.
For our customers, and for us, Item Assignment is not just a convenience feature. It’s part of a broader movement toward lighter-weight, more modern control of print shop workflows—which is exactly what this university was looking for. They were running a serious in-plant shop with an outdated system that was becoming increasingly complex over time.
When they requested the demo, they were interested enough to request an Order Manager review as part of evaluating their future workflow strategy. Once they saw it, they recognized this capability could let PageDNA take on more of the workflow role – getting them away from a physical job ticket workflow that is falling behind.
Schedule a Demo With Our Team
PageDNA is constantly striving to introduce new features that meet our customers’ growing needs, allowing them to expand their print shop operations while staying nimble. With our newest feature, we’re going beyond routing jobs to the right lane by giving every item a clear owner at each stage, helping print teams replace ambiguity and manual follow-up with visible, accountable workflows.
If you’re interested in seeing how Item Assignment can help your production workflow, contact us at sales@PageDNA.com to schedule a free demo today.
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