Regardless of the industry you work in, the history of proofs in printing industries illustrates the drive in most industries to find lower-cost ways to assure quality and customer satisfaction.

In printing industries, proofs were traditionally the result of a low-volume preliminary production run. They were generated for review and in order to perform any technical adjustments to ensure quality before committing time and resources to a full production run.

Traditional proofs were expensive to generate, but were still cheaper than running a full job through a production press only to discover afterwards that the document contains a mistake requiring a correction and another full printing.

To reduce the costs of generating traditional proofs, special lower-cost proof presses were used to generate proofs more economically. However, this still represented a significant cost in running the press and purchasing consumables. Digital proofing technologies were developed so that proofs could be printed on a special printer that simulated the output of a printing press, often without the need to create a plate or film. This allowed for the generation of even lower-cost (but still accurate) proofs without the expense of generating them on either production or proof presses.

With the maturation of digital production systems, many groups have begun to make use of yet another proofing technology called a soft proof. This is traditionally a proof of a printed document that is displayed to a monitor. Soft proofs provide an extremely low-cost approach to generating proofs, but are not appropriate for all proofing needs.

With the use of digital and soft proofs and their supporting technologies, the cost and speed of proofing documents has decreased. This has led to an increase in the efficiency of reviewing and approving deliverables while avoiding the significant and repetitive expenses of generating multiple rounds of expensive physical proofs for each review cycle.

Approval Manager is designed to streamline and manage the processes associated with reviewing proofs. Soft proofs can be handled completely within the Approval Manager application, while digital and traditional proofs can be printed and distributed to stakeholders. In this scenario, the workflow is created and managed in Approval Manager regardless of whether there is a corresponding file attachment.