Articles By Pat McGrew

Pat is a well-known evangelist for inkjet productivity. At McGrew Group, she uses her decades technical and marketing experience to lead the industry toward optimized business processes and production workflows. She has helped companies to define their five-year plans, audited workflow processes, and developed sales team interventions and education programs. Pat is the Co-Author of 8 industry books, editor of A Guide to the Electronic Document Body of Knowledge, and a regular contributor to Inkjet Insight and WhatTheyThink.com.

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Featured image for “Hardening Data Driven Print – Part 2”
June 8, 2022

Hardening Data Driven Print – Part 2

While you may not consider your business a likely target, talk to your peers the next time you get together. You’ll find that many printing companies have already been targeted with malware and ransomware. We get practical and build some actionable guidelines for data protection.
Featured image for “Hardening Data Driven Print”
June 1, 2022

Hardening Data Driven Print

Hardening is a process that IT and cybersecurity people use to guard against threats like malware and ransomware, but also to ensure that customer data remains unexposed as it is gathered, processed, used in business applications, and included in customer-facing communications.
Featured image for “Folding Carton and Inkjet”
May 4, 2022

Folding Carton and Inkjet

Printing solutions are available in many configurations and price ranges, from those that print a single box at a time to those supporting high volume production printing. They all share a common goal to produce a package that is functional and ensures the consumer of the brand and product it contains.
Featured image for “How to Build Sustainability into Your Strategy – Part 2”
April 27, 2022

How to Build Sustainability into Your Strategy – Part 2

Inkjet printing and marking technology in late-stage manufacturing has been around for decades, enabled by the integration of print modules within the manufacturing environment.
Featured image for “How to Build Sustainability into Your Strategy – Part 1”
April 20, 2022

How to Build Sustainability into Your Strategy – Part 1

In the print industry, sustainability is often equated with the creation, use, and recycling of substrates, but there are many other elements to consider.
Featured image for “When Something Goes Wrong – Business Continuity 102”
April 6, 2022

When Something Goes Wrong – Business Continuity 102

How common is business disruption in print? How fast can you recover? Is there a specific metric for knowing when you are recovered? You have questions and Pat McGrew has answers.
Featured image for “When Something Goes Wrong – Business Continuity 101”
March 23, 2022

When Something Goes Wrong – Business Continuity 101

With bucket loads of things that can disrupt your business. Pat McGrew recommends a strategy to identify the mission-critical elements of your business and a set of plans to invoke to ensure your survival.
Featured image for “Finishing Differentiates Your Opportunities”
March 2, 2022

Finishing Differentiates Your Opportunities

Finishing can be your differentiator, but you will have to think differently to make it fly. The goal is to find the things your customers want to buy and set a path to supply it.
Featured image for “High-Speed Finishing for High-Speed Inkjet”
February 23, 2022

High-Speed Finishing for High-Speed Inkjet

Learn about new unwind and rewind options, cutters, folders, stackers, perforators, stitchers, and wrappers, as well as full inline booklet makers and book manufacturing solutions for inkjet. While press manufacturers cranked up the speed on continuous presses and added sheetfed inkjet, the finishing vendors went into overdrive.
Featured image for “There’s a Wizard in my Ear – And That’s Good!”
February 9, 2022

There’s a Wizard in my Ear – And That’s Good!

Just about every vendor has or is working on solutions that make it easy to interact confidently with their technicians using virtual and remote solutions. They are only half of the equation. What’s the other half?
Featured image for “The Wizards Are Coming to A Machine Near You – and That’s Good!”
January 27, 2022

The Wizards Are Coming to A Machine Near You – and That’s Good!

Even with the training and documentation at hand, the processes, procedures, and parts orientations on large inkjet machines can be confusing.
Featured image for “Wizardly Workflow Guidance for 2022”
January 12, 2022

Wizardly Workflow Guidance for 2022

Automation, integration, and education are your three missions for 2022. Evaluate where you are and start moving toward a more optimized workflow to unlock maximum margin from every job.
Featured image for “Wild Workflow Learnings of 2021”
January 5, 2022

Wild Workflow Learnings of 2021

During 2021 we have seen interest in workflow automation grow from several directions.
Featured image for “An Inkjet Workflow Retrospective”
December 14, 2021

An Inkjet Workflow Retrospective

Despite the challenges of 2021, annual reviews are essential to finding a path to continue to grow. For some companies that path included new investments.
Featured image for “Imposing Workflows – Part 1”
December 1, 2021

Imposing Workflows – Part 1

To create optimized imposition processes today there are a host of choices that take the math and design aspects of imposition out of the hands of the prepress team and put it firmly in the hands of imposition engines
Featured image for “Solving Haunted Workflows – Part 2”
November 3, 2021

Solving Haunted Workflows – Part 2

A belated but still spooky mystery solved – Pat McGrew and her mystery machine meddle to solve your haunted workflows.
Featured image for “Solving Haunted Workflows – Part 1”
October 13, 2021

Solving Haunted Workflows – Part 1

Catch incorrect specifications before they become a major issue in your workflow – Pat McGrew tells us how.
Featured image for “Caring for Customers: Three Essentials”
September 29, 2021

Caring for Customers: Three Essentials

Learn about 3 essential customer interactions surrounding your inkjet journey and how to handle them successfully.
Featured image for “What’s in YOUR Dashboard?”
September 22, 2021

What’s in YOUR Dashboard?

Inkjet goes fast so production dashboards need to get the right information to the right teams even faster.
Featured image for “Web-to-Print for Inkjet – Creating a System of Record”
September 15, 2021

Web-to-Print for Inkjet – Creating a System of Record

The best practice when using web-to-print to feed high-speed inkjet environments is to make the W2P environment the system of record for job capture. Learn more about questions to ask and actions to take.

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