arifiQ Awarded US Patent for Automatic Estimating and Job Onboarding Technology

The US Patent and Trademark office has granted arifiQ Development AB a patent for “A system and a method of optimizing a print production process”, adding that arifiQ is the only technology in the US able to solve the industry’s severe print estimating bottleneck. arifiQ remedies the estimating problem by unleashing automatic job estimating and onboarding for ad-hoc/custom jobs. The patented arifiQ technology is today used in arifiQ’s estimating products, via APIs, and also in white label products.

In a world where everything else is available immediately, the wait for print job estimates has stood out as unusual and deeply frustrating. arifiQ eliminates the wait – completely – with the world’s fastest optimizing and estimating engine for print.

Why patentable

The system and method are patentable because they replace human decisions made by skilled estimators who work on print job estimates for days, finding the best production process. arifiQ finds and determines the best: Imposition/signatures, sheet size, printing press, paper; i.e., everything required for the job. In the same second that job specifications are decided, the runtimes and costs are also calculated.

arifiQ automation enables sales organizations and customers to initiate any print estimate online, get the quote, and place the order.

Optimization

The automatic optimization in arifiQ does not necessarily need to be based on cost/lowest price. Optimization can also be based on waste, delivery time, environmental impact, or other variables.

The Patent

The patent underscores the power of arifiQ’s advanced approach and represents a major departure from existing spreadsheet back ends and the primarily manual methods employed by the majority of the industry.

The arifiQ patent, US Patent No.10956099, covers:

• automatic calculation of production costs for each possible job,
• co-production (also known as “gang-run”),
• a virtual print driver, which sends job orders to the PSP[1] from any software application,
• an API for calculating print costs, and
• the ability to build marketplaces and portals, with multiple cooperating (or competing) printing companies.

Licensing

As this method for print estimating can become mandatory in the printing industry, arifiQ is expected to be inside or integrated with many different solutions including MIS, W2P, and Prepress and Production Workflows.

For instance, W2P systems of today can only provide immediate pricing for standard SKU jobs. The patented arifiQ method is breaking through that barrier to immediately price any type of print job, including custom print, making e-commerce possible for the demanding B2B segment.

“Printers and their customers cannot enjoy the benefits of digital workflows until every step is digitized.  Patented arifiQ technology closes what is arguably the last – and definitely the largest – analog gap, by automating estimating and job onboarding,” says arifiQ technology inventor, CTO Stefan Karlsson.

Source: arifiQ