What's prêt à print!

Greeting cards, Tuscany linen notes, embosser with changeable plates, personalized organizer and memos, gift wrapping ideas – the list to stationery ideas just goes on. With such diverse and exciting range of stationery products to design and bring to market, one can imagine the need for a tool that would manage the different processes that the industry demands.

Managing a ‘design-to-process-to-print’ project has not been easy so far because you had to use multiple tools to manage the various processes associated with your business. You were also constantly challenged by the limitations these tools had to offer in terms of customization and multiple-user sharing worksheets. All these features are a necessity especially in a collaborative business such as yours, where the design professional, retailer and manufacturer needs to be working in a synchronous mode even though they could exist in different geographies. An effective workflow management is essential to bridge this gap and to achieving time-to-market, quality and cost objectives of design, retail and print organizations.

prêt-à-print fills that gap and unites design management capabilities with a custom designed workflow management tool that design professionals, retailers and manufactures can use every day. prêt-à-print serves as a one stop shop where all of you can collaborate and work to design, customize, manage, track, print and sell the greeting cards and stationery you create!

prêt-à-print is an innovative web-based collaborative workflow management service that is ideal for stationery industry professionals. Whether you are a design professional, a retailer or a manufacturer it transforms the project management process for you completely, making the ‘design-to-process-to-print’ workflow so much more efficient and easy.

prêt-à-print serves as a catalog & design resource manager, a design studio, a template builder, a report generator and a print manager all rolled into one. You can design & customize the greeting cards & other stationery ideas online and send drafts of the designs to clients for approvals or further revisions. The approved designs can then be printed directly or saved in a PDF format to be printed later. There are also features that let you track & manage your orders and resources at the click of a button.

prêt-à-print is broken down into 4 different sections, each of which is designed to house certain processes. The four sections and the key things you can do here are:

Front Office		Design Room		Process Room		Back Office
This page is a business intelligence report that gives you the bird’s-eye view of the application since the last login. The view typically includes the status of current orders, details of new orders, customer comments, details of recently uploaded images, details of recently created templates, and various other filters that will give a quick overview of your business environment. This section also gives you one-click access to additional application functionality as required.		As the name suggests, this is the area where the creative juices flow. Here design professionals & manufacturers create templates and organize them in catalogs. Custom designs can be easily built using the template builder and retailers can choose from the catalogs to create orders. Once the order is placed, the design professionals & manufacturers work on their drafts here. This is also the section where card background images can be uploaded and managed in catalogs.		This section of prêt-à-print provides easy access to all order related details. For each order, you can track all communications you have with your client while reviewing a design. There is even an easy access filter mechanism in place to help pull up only the required details on screen. You have features like create, delete, edit and archive for orders and can also print the details directly from here or download them as PDF to print later.		This section among many other things lets you manage user accounts, create new log-ins for your employees, view reports and generate invoices. These reports and invoices can be easily printed from here. This is also the section where design professionals and manufacturers upload custom resources like fonts and colors. They can manage their resources of fonts and colors that would suit the seasonal updates and new card catalogs.