RBA - What has it done for you?

Started by SpicyVindaloo, August 28, 2016, 01:59:07 PM

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SpicyVindaloo

Hey all, it's been a while since I've been on here. I've never used RBA before and am wondering if it's worth the price. We are a web and sheetfed printer doing a variety of products. No digital printing. What kinds of things did RBA do for your company? 
Since every job's a snowflake and unique in some way, what things can you automate?

DCurry

We are both offset and digital, and we use RBA quite extensively. Some tasks are housekeeping-related (we have one that will move jobs from our main server to a storage server when you click a certain button in the job finder).

We have a daily program for a major restaurant chain, and this one will take PDFs generated by our web-to-print system and refine, impose, send to our digital presses, save an imposed PDF to the server in case we need it, then clean up after itself. We use a few variations of this on other customers with similar needs.

We also integrate Smart Hotfolders to move files to their proper destinations. Plus, we have RedPoint and a server-based version of SmartStream so we can really do a lot of lights-out variable data and static file processing. It really takes a lot of manual work off our plates, but when something goes awry it's a nightmare to untangle because some of them are enormously complex.

Having said all that, I think we barely even scratch the surface of what is possible with RBA.
Prinect • Signa Station • XMPie

Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a night. But set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life!

born2print

We barely use it here.
1 RBA that archives / purges and moves a job when set to Completed. With automated emails for failures of any kind.

That said, it is very powerful and we could use it more, but our client's aren't sophisticated enough or the projects are all "snowflakes" (I LOVE THAT!) so it just won't work.
...and I am glad!
If clients could upload, preflight, rip, approve, have RBA do the impo and send to plating, etc.... then they wouldn't need me!
How will I laugh tomorrow...
when I can't even smile today?

Joe

Like born2print said, we use it for archiving and purging after the archive.

I do use it for a few jobs for some mundane stuff but nothing earth shattering. I've been working for a couple of years trying to automate a job that uploads weekly but the page counts constantly change. Every time I solve one issue 3 more pops up. To use it fully one would need to be a VBScript developer to write custom code and an Oracle database developer to implement it all. Just the drag and drop options for the RBA editor is quite limited it seems.
Mac OS Sonoma 14.2.1 (c) | (retired)

The seven ages of man: spills, drills, thrills, bills, ills, pills and wills.

Farabomb

That's not what the Kodak salesman told me. He said it was amazing and would improve the workflow. Glad we didn't buy it and went with evo.

The techs were talking about the install they had at jostens and it sounded impressive but it's easier to implement when you have set standards. In commercial offset there are so many snowflakes it's constant whiteout conditions.
Speed doesn't kill, rapidly becoming stationary is the problem

I'd rather have stories told than be telling stories of what I could have done.

Quote from: Ear on April 06, 2016, 11:54:16 AM
Quote from: Farabomb on April 06, 2016, 11:39:41 AMIt's more like grip, grip, grip, noise, then spin and 2 feet in and feel shame.
I once knew a plus-sized girl and this pretty much describes teh secks. :rotf:
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
         —Benjamin Franklin

My other job

Joe

Quote from: Farabomb on August 29, 2016, 12:19:57 PMThat's not what the Kodak salesman told me. He said it was amazing and would improve the workflow. Glad we didn't buy it and went with evo.

The techs were talking about the install they had at jostens and it sounded impressive but it's easier to implement when you have set standards. In commercial offset there are so many snowflakes it's constant whiteout conditions.

I hate to break it you man but salesmen have a tendency to not always tell the truth. Shocking I know.
Mac OS Sonoma 14.2.1 (c) | (retired)

The seven ages of man: spills, drills, thrills, bills, ills, pills and wills.

Farabomb

Like "I'm going out to get work" but it really means fuck you, I don't have to do my job.

Or is that just here?
Speed doesn't kill, rapidly becoming stationary is the problem

I'd rather have stories told than be telling stories of what I could have done.

Quote from: Ear on April 06, 2016, 11:54:16 AM
Quote from: Farabomb on April 06, 2016, 11:39:41 AMIt's more like grip, grip, grip, noise, then spin and 2 feet in and feel shame.
I once knew a plus-sized girl and this pretty much describes teh secks. :rotf:
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
         —Benjamin Franklin

My other job

DCurry

Quote from: born2print on August 29, 2016, 11:56:59 AMIf clients could upload, preflight, rip, approve, have RBA do the impo and send to plating, etc.... then they wouldn't need me!


Agreed, but who says you have to give your clients the access to it? You can use it to make your own life easier!

I am an RBA novice - I know very little about actually setting one up, but I can take an existing one and tweak it fairly easily. We have one customer, a national hotel chain, who orders about 11 different pieces of collateral. On any given day, we might have 2 or 25 coming through the shop (usually on the higher side). These are all for digital printing from PDFs generated by our in-house W2P solution, so I know the PDFs are always good, but needless to say it gets tiresome to constantly have to touch these files day in and day out. Taking the time to build and test an RBA has saved me from having to ever touch these files again (unless an odd size or page count comes through). If I were concerned about job security, I would still do the same thing, but wouldn't tell anyone and instead of the CSR dropping the files I would just drop them myself.

Prinect • Signa Station • XMPie

Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a night. But set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life!

SpicyVindaloo

Thanks everyone!
I searched quite a bit on it and watched a bunch of videos and almost all of them give the archiving example and not much more. The sales reps tout how great it is but again, archiving. And then say most people only utilize it a fraction of what it can do. Which makes me wonder why that is.
I can see where it would be great in some environments, but I'm really thinking there are better ways to spend that $22k.

DCurry

Yeah, you gotta do a lot with it to justify that price tag. It's overkill for most shops, I would think. My shop is a rarity in that we are owned by a marketing company with a national presence in 20 cities, and they are very tech-oriented so we can afford it as well as make use of it.

One of these days I might actually learn more about it!
Prinect • Signa Station • XMPie

Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a night. But set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life!

Joe

Quote from: DCurry on August 30, 2016, 06:07:59 AMYeah, you gotta do a lot with it to justify that price tag. It's overkill for most shops, I would think. My shop is a rarity in that we are owned by a marketing company with a national presence in 20 cities, and they are very tech-oriented so we can afford it as well as make use of it.

One of these days I might actually learn more about it!

They get most folks because it is the easiest way to automate backup of Prinergy jobs and the only way within Prinergy and then make some unrealistic promises about what else it can do. Yeah if you have a couple of full time developers on hand you can do almost anything. For the average drag-n-drop-n-pray prepresser is just takes a lot of time and effort creating anything very complex. Something most of the prepress world doesn't have.
Mac OS Sonoma 14.2.1 (c) | (retired)

The seven ages of man: spills, drills, thrills, bills, ills, pills and wills.

scottrsimons

We use RBA for a fair amount of jobs, but not as much as I would like. Heading to GUA this year, so hopefully I will make use of it more. Using RBA for archiving is way over kill for the money. We/I have done some programming for just specific jobs only, that happen on a regular basis. That is where the product shines. For example,  One time type of job comes in a couple of times a year, and it includes about 10 different jobs, all about the same. The RBA will RIP the files put them in layouts print out laser proofs of single page PDFs, and of the IMPOs. And then also enable the job in Insite and notify the customer that they need to approve the pages. And then once we plate the job, it does a few other things behind the scenes. I also use RBA tied in with AppleScript on the Mac, and Batch scripting on the PC to quite a few other functions that Prinergy can not do by itself.

It's like any other tool. It's only really good, if you know how to use it, and what to use it for. And this tool is really hard to quantify.

Hope this helps.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!" - Homer J. Simpson