29 mar. 2021
Using a web-to-print system makes it easy for your clients to order online, but it does bring up an interesting question: what about quality control? What do you check in the files that are uploaded? And most importantly: when do you check it?
Our CTO David van Driessche gives you some best practices.
It’s worthwhile separating two different scenarios. If you use templates, you probably don’t even need quality control. You’ve created the templates, so the production files are always going to be good. But what if you allow customers to upload files or part of a template? Will those files always be correct? It’s safe to say that in that scenario you will need quality control.
Instinctively then, you could assume that you have to do quality control as early as possible. After all, you don’t want bad files in your production workflow.
But what does that do with your relationship with your customer? Are they going to understand what those problems are you point out? Will they be able to fix them? Or are they just going to go to a printer who isn’t that difficult to work with?
From a technical point of view, anything is possible. You can accept the files, preflight them and give feedback even before the order. You could accept everything and silently fix them in prepress. Or you could do small preflights before the order is placed and do more thorough quality control later.
None of these possibilities is right or wrong. It all depends on your company, on your clients and the relationship you have with them. What is important is that you make this a business decision. Products should serve your business. Not the other way around.