Interview With

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?