How Rorohiko workflow automation slashes system time
Your current workflow operation will be based on a series of stages that manage the progress of jobs from start to finish. A range of software programs are used at various points. Typically your workflow will crisscross between your system and specialist programs as each job advances.
Rorohiko will design an automation that integrates your stages of progress with your specialist programs into one effective stream eliminating much of the time-consuming crisscross.
Our long experience equips us to work out an efficient plan of attack by first spending time observing your current workflow stages and what they produce.
We then develop an overall design that gradually improves efficiency without disrupting any existing workflow. We work out small, incremental automations that ultimately all fit together into an optimized, customized workflow.
View some of the case studies below to gauge the considerable efficiencies we have introduced for clients. If you wish we will provide references of projects undertaken within New Zealand, Australia, USA and Europe. E-mail us on [email protected] for a list of reference contacts.
Case studies:
Web-based Yearbook Automation
Rorohiko Workflow Resources undertook a project of optimization of a web-based yearbook publishing system.
In this system, schools use a web browser to select a yearbook style and page templates from a pre-made catalogue of yearbook assets. Then they provide content and images to ‘flow’ into the selected pages.
The process of building the pages at the receiving end, using InDesign, Photoshop, and various other tools was documented in a 200+ page procedure manual: downloading school-provided contents and image assets from the web server; building pages from templates; creating previews; uploading previews to the web server for the schools to inspect… as so on. A very labor intensive system as the 200 + page manual suggests.
After the automation was finished the modified procedure manual was only a fraction of that. That reflected in employee-time per page reducing to a fraction of what it was with no more room for error.
Amongst other efficiencies are the automation of page content downloads, the building of pages, the creation and upload of previews.
InDesign-based Yearbook Automation
Rorohiko Workflow Resources built tools for a major USA-based yearbook printer. These tools are intended for schools that build their yearbook pages in InDesign.
The Rorohiko tools encompass advanced functions such as a student database with student pictures, completed page upload ability, building and maintenance of complex photo grids, and index generation.
The picture database automatically drives the building and maintenance of photo pages. Where previously adding a student to or removing a student from a class caused a major hassle, this is now a breeze – the pages automatically adjust.
The photo pages are not simple grids – they allow for complex layouts. Index generation is automatic, and automatically finds and combines references to people’s names and nicknames into a single index entry – this is also driven by the student database.
Auto-border function
Rorohiko Workflow Resources built a component for automatically delineating advertising and editorial content in a newspaper.
Our customer has a lot of in-house knowledge about automation and they built their own workflow automation, but there was one major hiccup that remained. On each page the advertisements are roughly grouped together and a ‘demarcation line’ visually separates advertising space from editorial content.
Creating the demarcation line was still manual. Often the advertisements occupied a non-rectangular and complex shape. Drawing a nice, smooth line around this shape seemed an impossible task to automate.
We built a component that fits into our customers’ automated workflow, and now these lines are fully automated.
The software has enough smarts to ‘smooth over’ small differences in width or height in adjacent advertisements and ignore the small gaps between them. It slashes the time needed for demarcating page from minutes down to a fraction of a second.