Tomorrow night we will push a bunch of substantial changes to the the PixtaFlow servers. Please make sure you have reviewed the staging version of PixtaFlow before your work week begins.

To go along with our updated materials “families,” we’ve updated the PixtaFlow product rigger.  The product rigger takes advantage of the family of materials to easily build templates/products from those families, so production set up is a snap.

On Friday, January 11, 2013, we’re going to launch a new materials layout to simplify estimating and materials manipulation.  In this release we are implementing a concept we call material “families” to assist in organizing materials while estimating, putting in jobs for CSR’s, and updating materials for inventory.  Having a “family” of materials allows a natural grouping of materials related by one or more common attributes, say all Coroplast or Banner Vinyl.  We’ve added customized filtering in the material view so that now it is easier than ever to view only the materials you want to edit.

We are always improving our products to make your work life easier and to give you the best value in production management software!

Pixta hopes the new year brings you much prosperity.

Changes to materials handling in PixtaFlow Estimator allows unparalleled pricing flexibility.

Wishing you and yours a very happy holiday season!

From David, Tom, Monica, Roy and the rest of the team at Pixta

As our mission is to ALWAYS improve our products and processes, the Customer Portal is now configured to talk directly to our awesome product price Estimator, allowing print customers to build their own products based on a print shop’s capability and see the estimated price on the fly.  This is part of a larger effort to further reduce the workload within the shop by passing along tasks that can be accomplished by the customer instead of the shop.   Contact us for more information on how you can reduce your workload and make your processes more efficient!

We’ve added a new feature for PixtaFlow: “Submitted date”.

The PixtaFlow queues are great for managing what stage an active job is in but when you want to put a job on hold,  that job becomes inactive.  Eventually though the job on hold may be placed back into production, this is  the purpose of “Submitted date”.

“Submitted date” facilitates keeping track of the time a job actually enters production without respect to the original date it was created.  It’s a subtle distinction but one that is really important for catalog approvals and production holds.  Being able to sort by this state now facilitates sorting by active jobs in production.

Give it a test drive and let us know if it helps.

It was great to meet with so many customers during the SGIA conference and show PixtaStudio. Your feedback is really important to us and expect to see several new features by the end-of-the year.

Pixta will be formally unveiling its latest print management product, PixtaStudio, at the upcoming SGIA trade show in Las Vegas next week and I wanted to give our loyal readers a sneak peek at what we have in store.

Pixta’s cloud based print management products, such as PixtaSynapse, PixtaFlow and PixtaCatalog, have been out for a few years now and we have enjoyed success with each of our products and the ROI they bring to businesses.  While each of these products perform very well as stand-alone products, Pixta designed them from the start to be part of a more powerful platform, one that integrates all Pixta products and folds in new ones to create a truly seamless licensed print management service from start to finish, from customer contact, right through to automated ship labeling and invoicing.  PixtaStudio is that integrated platform.

Two new products developed by Pixta make PixtaStudio a real print management powerhouse.  The first is our Estimator, which has been seamlessly integrated into the front end of PixtaFlow, and allows job estimations to be accomplished on iPads and other mobile devices, as well as desktop computers.  We’ve modeled the various expenses common in a large-format print shop to take the guesswork out of estimating, producing consistent and quickly repeatable quotes, regardless of who is providing the estimate.   Once the estimate is approved by the customer, with one tap, the estimate is converted into an active PixtaFlow job from which production can start.

Our second new product is PixtaShipStation.  This service is integrated into the back end of the PixtaFlow process and provides simplified one-click FedEx label printing,  tracking numbers and email notifications.   Using PixtaShipStation your company can avoid entering contact information multiple times, which reduces errors while quickly printing as many labels as required.

From customer contact, to estimation, production, shipping, and invoicing, PixtaStudio integrates all our Cloud services into one easy-to-use core product:

• PixtaSynapse - Easy-to-use secure large file transfer from a web browser
• PixtaFlow - Print job management, mobile Estimator, Customer Portals, ShipStation FedEx integration, Job board, QuickBooks, and more
• PixtaCatalog - Customized Digital Storefronts with integration with FedEx, Approvals, Inventory and much more

Visit us in booth 163 at the SGIA trade show in Las Vegas starting on October 18th though the 20th.  We will be demonstrating all of our products.  We hope to see you there!