Turbocharging SPDE Workflows with SOLitrack: 9 Game-Changing Features

Solimar® Print Director™ Enterprise (SPDE) plays a crucial role as a workhorse in numerous production workflows, often serving as an unsung hero. However, the real magic happens when you pair SPDE with SOLitrack™, a low-cost, pre-integrated, state-of-the-art production dashboard. This presentation highlights nine key ways SOLitrack can dramatically improve your SPDE workflows, taking them to the next level.
1. Customizable Web-Based Visibility
SOLitrack boasts a feature-rich, web-based dashboard that provides not only real-time visibility into your plant's operations but also grants control from any web browser. With this functionality, you can monitor and manage your workflow internally while also granting customers limited views of job statuses.
2. Comprehensive Tracking
As the name suggests, SOLitrack excels at tracking. It maintains a database that stores detailed information about jobs, enabling you to track Solimar products easily. Additionally, its APIs enable seamless tracking of activities from other software products, even manual processes like hand insertion. The accumulated tracking data serves not only to provide real-time insights but also facilitates metric-driven analysis of your jobs and processes over time.
3. Performance and Ink & Media Reporting
Leveraging a robust database, SOLitrack allows you to mine business information from job data, driving operational efficiency. Its extensive built-in dashboarding and reporting features provide at-a-glance views and enable the creation of custom reports for business intelligence purposes. With Job Definition Format(JDF) support, you can even track ink and media usage on a job-by-job basis, providing insights into operational costs.
4. Debugging and Fixing Jobs
When something goes wrong with SPDE, SOLitrack is your reliable troubleshooter. It maintains an extensive breadcrumb trail of processing activities and warns you if workflow steps fall behind schedule. This allows you to fix and resubmit problematic jobs without returning to the source system. SOLitrack's sophisticated alert mechanism promptly notifies you of any issues, allowing for quick resolution and minimal disruption to production.
5. SLA Management & Scheduling
Most production workflows involve service level agreements (SLAs) tied to jobs. SOLitrack simplifies SLA management by enabling you to assign SLAs to SPDE jobs, providing real-time tracking of job progress relative to their deadlines. By incorporating scheduling capabilities, SOLitrack ensures that work is completed on time, minimizing delays and meeting customer expectations.
6. Maximize Throughput of Multiple SPDE Systems
If your operation includes multiple SPDE servers, SOLitrack is a powerful tool for load balancing. It automatically checks available servers and distributes jobs to the least busy ones, optimizing processing power and accelerating your SPDE workflows.
7. Duplicate File Checking
SOLitrack's optional feature prevents duplicate jobs from being released into production more than once, saving time and reducing potential errors. This feature goes beyond file name comparisons and actually checks the job content, ensuring no duplicates slip through the cracks.
8. Proof, Reject & Approve Jobs
SOLitrack's multi-step approval workflows streamline the proofing process, allowing for auto-approvals based on predefined rules or schedules. Notifiers keep approvers informed, and detailed reporting ensures transparency throughout the approval process.
9. "Airport Monitor View"
A standout feature of SOLitrack is its SLA management capability, which can be displayed on a big-screen monitor in designated work areas. By customizing the display to show jobs relevant to each area, employees can easily track their progress and prioritize tasks, boosting productivity and adherence to schedules.
In conclusion, SOLitrack provides a range of invaluable features that complement and enhance SPDE workflows. Its customizable dashboard, extensive tracking and reporting capabilities, debugging support, SLA management, load balancing, duplicate checking, approval workflows, and "Airport Monitor View" all contribute to improved efficiency and streamlined operations. Together, SPDE and SOLitrack create a powerful combination that exceeds the sum of its parts, offering a cost-effective solution for optimizing production workflows.