How do you build a solution that’s flexible, scalable, and reliable enough to support any size print business, in almost any industry, anywhere in the world, while also fitting the budget? Chris Knighton knows. He explains it all in his recent Inkish interview with Morten Reitoft on Tuesday, April 24th 2020. He and his co-founder Nigel Watson started OneFlow Systems, Ltd, in 2013 with the initial goal of reducing print service providers’ onboarding time.

…we were having discussions with many print service providers at the time and they were saying to us, “Chris, it takes sometimes weeks or even months for us to do a technical integration for online orders, doesn’t matter the source.” And we thought about accomplishing that within days or hours, if at all possible. And that was the beginning of the journey.

But Chris’s vision was bigger. He wasn’t just thinking about the print services providers (PSPs), he was also thinking about the future:

Our vision was to grow a network of connected brands and print service providers around the world.

To build this global print network, Chris needed to enable print service providers with the solution brands were asking for.

[Doesn’t matter if you’re the biggest brand or a start-up…] your challenges are the same. When you need…your product printed in a local country, then ultimately you have to do a technical integration. Now, … every print service provider that you work with has their own systems … and each technical integration takes three months, you can imagine the impact that that would have on your business growth. It completely slows it down.

From there, Chris and Nigel built the world’s most flexible, scalable, and reliable cloud-based solution to help PSPs on-board brands in hours, not weeks. As well as improve the PSP’s whole business efficiency, by expanding the solution to be end-to-end. Now, not only can their solution integrate rapidly, but it can also automate pre-press, optimize production management through finishing, assembly, reconciliation, and shipping, and provide automated reports back on every item. Site Flow’s solution streamlines any print business to increase profits, reduce costs, and enable higher throughput, enabling one company to take on $1 million dollars in sales while only adding one person in the process. The agility of Site Flow’s solution attracted the attention of HP and the HP PrintOS team. Thus the courting began. To learn more about how Site Flow developed that relationship and was eventually acquired by HP last year (2019), watch the full interview on Inkish.tv.

HP branded the Site Flow solution as HP Site Flow (www.hpsiteflow.com). Now Chris focuses on his vision of enabling brands to easily connect with print service providers (PSPs) as well as help PSPs future-proof their business.

…let’s get the print industry away from this whole FTP mechanism, the dinosaur era, [and] let’s fast forward it, throw it straight into the API world and we will provide a single gateway for every brand to connect to around the world and then we will be able to provide all the traffic to any PSP in the world.