Removing the worry

Please can you introduce yourself and your role at Solimar Systems?

I’m Jamie Walsh, regional sales manager of Solimar Systems. I look after the UK market, European, into the Middle East, Africa, and also a little bit of Asia Pacific as well.

Can you please tell me a bit firstly about what Solimar Systems does as a company?

Solimar Systems is a 30-year-old business and we’re based out in San Diego in California. We’ve had a presence in the UK for the last 30 years and we basically provide workflow solutions that support customers' needs from end-to-end within their factory processes for print and digital communications.

Since the company was founded over 30 years ago, how have things evolved over that time?

We’ve seen many changes in the industry. The emergence of the PDF as one of the de facto standards has been quite a major consideration for us as a business. So, we started very much with data transformation solutions to support transactional mailing environments; but we’ve morphed and continued to increase our portfolio breadth and gamut to address the needs of the modern-day communications printer.

So we’re providing solutions for PDF optimisation, document reengineering, and more recently is remote access into the business to support tracking, monitoring, and dashboarding of the manufacturing processes that take place within our customers.

And has that remote accessing come as a result of the events of the past few years?

It’s certainly accelerated it. I think the pandemic was an ideal opportunity to take advantage of these opportunities. For example, production managers and senior managers within businesses couldn’t get access to the shop floor, they were left somewhat blind as to what was taking place, where customer jobs were, and how to feed that back in a timely fashion. So our SOLitrack product has really addressed that increasingly well.

What sort of customers would go for a Solimar Solution?

Our customers range from everything from small businesses in the print industry such as quick print, print for pay establishments, all the way through to Fortune 500 companies in the states, the large service providers and bureaus, people in transactional print, and direct mail. Packaging has also become more and more relevant to our customers. Anybody who uses PDF and needs to manage that process flow from onboarding of customers’ work through to the end point of delivery.

And then what are some of the key things you’re seeing people looking for at the moment?

One of the key things is PDF optimisation. Because it’s become such a standard within the industry, everybody has the ability to make a PDF, however does everybody really understand the mechanics of how to make good PDF that is usable and easy for the print service provider or the communication provider to work with? Everybody has the ability to go ‘file, print, PDF’, however there’s a lot of other settings that sit behind the print drivers if those aren’t addressed. Then they can create issues for the service provider to print; and that causes problems from productivity and throughput of the actual print engines.

And do you find that quite a big part of your job is explaining to people how these systems can add benefit to a company?

Absolutely. What we like to try and do is get onsite with customers and understand their workflow from the start point all the way to the end. So it is about discovery and it’s about trying to find those areas where there’s bottlenecks. Maybe there’s additional manual labour being put in place to fix problems that we can automate. That then gives a return on investment (ROI) profit to the customers.

In terms of Solimar’s presence at The Print Show 2022, can you tell us about what you had on show?

We worked with ASL which is one of our UK partners. We’ve been working with the company for around 18 months now. ASL has a very nice message for its customers that it allows its customers to choose. ASL supplies print engines from a range of manufacturers like Kyocera, Xerox, Ricoh, Canon, OKI, and Epson, covering a wide gamut of applications. Our products are very vendor-neutral, so we have a very agnostic view of workflow. Therefore, we can help complement those print vendors to attract more volume onto their devices, increase the ROI and help streamline that for their customers.

And how did you demonstrate that at the show?

We had a number of solutions like the ReadyPDF optimisation where if customers have a PDF with them we can drop it through a very simple automated workflow and show them the effects of the optimisation tools. So we can have a before and after file so they can then take those files and have them printed on the engines.

We also had the ability to show our SOLitrack dashboard system which has the ability to monitor the devices around the stand as well to show where jobs are in the various stages of production.

Just going back to the relationship with ASL, how did that come about?

That came about through a chance meeting with Will Doherty. I’ve known Will for many years now, we met at an event and he said ‘I think I might have some customers that potentially need some support in the workflow’, they were looking to sell hardware to them but they didn’t have anything to address the workflow. So they came to us and we did the discovery work with them and it actually transpired that we sold a really nice automated solution to quite a big business-to-consumer client. That’s going really well now and we’re looking to grow that and repeat it in potentially other countries with the guys at ASL and their customer.

And finally, what’s in store for the future for Solimar Systems?

The print and communication industry is forever moving. It’s always evolving and it’s always subject to new technology. So we’re putting a lot of effort and resource into our R&D of products which we continually update to keep everything fresh. We work with our customer advisory council to get advice from them for the new challenges that they’re facing in their industry as well. We see great movement in JDF and JMF and the XJDF world, we’re looking at other technologies that are struggling because of the lack of development from the original creators as well. We’re looking at how we can apply our solutions and build out our solutions to address those issues, so the customers don’t have to be worried. That’s one of the big things we like to do, take away the worry and concern from the customer.

Is there anything you’d like to add?

Trade shows are great for the industry as it does give us a chance to come back as an industry. There’s so much on show here from feeding, finishing, print engines, software across a whole gamut of industries as well. It’s not just about paper, it’s about digital communication, it’s about creating apparel, creating signage, and there’s a good buzz about the place as well. I think it’s really good to get people back together, keep conversations going, catch up with old faces, and obviously engage with new opportunities.

If anybody wants to get in touch to find out more about Solimar Systems, how can they do so?

We have a great website which is www.solimarsystems.com which has a great range of information on there. I can also be contacted directly at Jamie.walsh@solimarsystems.com or there is a Contact Us button on the website.

Or you can talk to the guys at ASL who are supporting us greatly in the UK as well.

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