Issue link: https://docs.hic.us/i/668488
Background Universal Screen Arts offers a number of popular catalogs under various brands, such as "Signals", "What On Earth," and more. They have seen signif- icant expansion over the past few years thanks to their increasingly popular catalog offerings and new online store. As a successful catalog and ecom- merce company that specializes in amusing trinkets and clever apparel, the company carries a large variety of garments and products that are perfectly suited for personalization. They have many unique gift items developed exclusively for their business, and now offer personalizations on many of these products to make each item completely one-of-a- kind. CASE STUDY #4 Universal Screen Arts - Complex Variable Dataing The Problem The customer was producing personalized images for their Kornit digital printer manually by editing a series of templates from Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe In-Design. A graphic artist had to create each image file individually by replac- ing the text in the template with text from an order spreadsheet, and then assign the proper parame- ters for the setup of the Kornit machine. In addition, some of the company's templates required that the graphic artist replace text based on formulas provid- ed by the customer, which often required mathemat- ical calculations to create the results that would be printed. The process was too labor intensive and re- quired many manual inputs, which greatly increased the likelihood of errors. Much of their profits from personalization were being spent on the labor required to complete them, so they needed a system that would reduce the design time required for each order. The bottleneck effect that occurred when many personalization orders were received was greatly slowing down produc- tion. With the increase in sales volume of their per- sonalized products, they would not be able to keep up with the pace at which they received orders, if they had to manually create each order, so they connected with Pulse to find a solution. The Solution Pulse implemented an automated solution that reads the company's existing order files and au- tomatically generates machine-ready design files based on their predefined templates. Each order received by the company contains information such as the order number, template name and the text to be replaced in the various text fields of the template. The PulseID automation system imports the data containing personalization information for multiple orders at once, automatically calculating the customers' formulas and inputs to be used by the selected templates. This creates a production ready image file for each order based on the cus- tomer's inputs and the company's rules without any manual input. This hands-free process completely eliminates manual design from the personalization process, so Universal Screen Arts' graphic artists are now free to create new templates and static garment designs for additional revenue. Pulse also provided a symbolic "language" allow- ing the artists to insert codes into their templates to control the resulting designs. For example, a text element containing "S2MC" will automatically substitute the second text entered by the customer and force "mixed case" – first letter upper case, and remaining letters lower case. So if the custom- er enters "SAm", PulseID will transform it to "Sam", because of the instruction from the artist.