Fujifilm has announced the commercial availability of its cloud-based web-to-print solution ‘XMF Print Centre’. Utilising its expertise in cloud-based printing from within its web-to-print photo business, which last year processed over 5 million orders, the company has tailored this solution for the print industry. It aims to help printers extend the print services they offer across both offset and digital production as more business moves online.
XMF Print Centre allows a print service provider to easily create single or multiple e-commerce portals tailored to the requirements of individual or multiple customers, and supports a wide variety of static and variable data printed products. The customisable web shop allows users to very simply adapt their web shop branding for a particular target market or client, and is suitable for all print business from commercial to wide format.
John Davies, business strategy manager, workflow, FUJIFILM Europe, comments: “We are confident that the commercial availability of our web-to-print solution brings end users the best of both worlds: our experience of hosted cloud-based systems from other areas of the Fujifilm business coupled with our established XMF workflow technologies.” He continues, “We have had a lot of interest in the product since we announced our intention to launch at the start of the summer, and are looking forward to fulfilling these implementations in the coming weeks. XMF Print Centre is very quick to set up and deploy, typically taking just a week.”
Rob Gutteridge, Technical Director at Gildenburgh in the UK, the first beta–testing site for XMF Print Centre adds, “After rigorously testing Fujifilm’s new XMF Print Centre over the last few months we are confident that this solution has huge potential and is a strong web-to-print contender. You only have to listen to the feedback we have been receiving from our customers, which is extremely positive.” He adds, “The solution has inherent flexibility, and the interface is particularly easy to use. We think it is an excellent product and has already helped us generate new business.”
As well as working with Fujifilm’s XMF Workflow, XMF Print Centre is also compatible will all other print production workflow systems on the market, allowing a printer to add XMF Print Centre easily to an existing workflow infrastructure.
Over the last few months, this new web-to-print solution has undergone stringent beta testing, and as a result several new features have been introduced. A lot of emphasis has been placed on the development of its user interface, ensuring that it is extremely straightforward to use. The print buyer experience includes a simple product selector, an interactive job editor with live job updates, and a familiar payment and delivery checkout system. The job editor features enhanced text editing and provides the ability to upload and pre-flight PDF files for printing. All online orders are then automatically routed to one or more print locations for printing and order fulfilment. Additional support for spot colours also allows for more corporate and professional work to be managed.
The back office of XMF Print Centre offers a set of very comprehensive tools for managing all aspects of the online print environment. The users can define their pricing models, set client specific discounts, create new products for sale and manage other criteria that might encourage future business - such as creating vouchers and issuing email newsletters.
“We believe that web-to-print systems will not replace the one-to-one relationship that printers develop with their clients for the more complex print jobs, but some of the simpler jobs will be more economical to manage via online methods. Web-to-print will most certainly have a place within all successful print service providers’ businesses," concludes John.
