Ricoh’s MarcomCentral empowers non-professionals to submit production jobs

Ricoh’s MarcomCentral has unveiled JobDirect Plus, a tool that helps non-print professionals submit jobs to workflows.

Commercial printers are engaging with wider audiences than print professionals and more enterprises are deploying production devices in-house.

“A new world of work is evolving and part of it is changing the way people create and use print,” says Jacques van Wyk, COO of Ricoh SA. “Marketing campaigns are more integrated across several channels, media, and mediums, enterprises are making more widespread use of production output for internal and external facing communications, the devices themselves can print to a wider variety of media giving companies more options today than ever before, and many commercial printers are reaching new target markets based on simpler, more efficient processes, more capable offerings, cross-media integration, and workflow enhancements.”

“JobDirect Plus is a tool that enables seamless interaction with print material creation by focusing on relevant features and customisations through a smartphone-like touch screen user interface (UI) that’s still neatly integrated with print room workflows,” he says.

JobDirect integration with Ricoh TotalFlow helps streamline and increase the efficiency of a print business’s overall operation, enabling print jobs to flow through a fully automated print production path with no user intervention required. 

Print providers can launch a customer-facing online ordering process with JobDirect Plus and scale according to customers’ and their own needs. Integration with the MarcomCentral family of products brings value-add services like variable data publishing, brand control, e-mail marketing, sales enablement, analytics and more.

Hosted in Europe, JobDirect Plus is hosted in Europe and offered as both a standalone online submission tool that emits press-ready files for production or as an add-on to the MarcomCentral Web-to-Print product, offering a flexible and competitive way to build new revenue streams as the need arises.

“Printers increasingly need to capture, manage, and transform information quicker and more effectively,” says Van Wyk.

With JobDirect Plus printers can now:

• Offer their clients new customisation capabilities useful for maintaining brand consistency, such as personalised media options, including colour overlay and size selection;
• Deliver added flexibility to their clients who need to rotate, hide or insert blank pages; mix colour and monochrome jobs; create tab and slip sheets; upload multiple files; and monitor job tracking, billing, reporting and split shipping;
• Produce and transform JDF output through the TotalFlow solutions;
• Offer client portals with features such as user permissions, 33 global languages, and product catalogues to help build new revenue streams; and
• Present their clients with live price quoting via the easy-to-use UI.