ZenSmart

ZenSmart is a workflow automation platform that enables make to order and print on demand manufacturers in apparel, merchandise, photo, direct mail, signage and commercial print - to achieve peak production efficiency. ZenSmart automates the entire production process. It retrieves orders and artwork from any order source, intelligently applies business rules to enable automatic queuing, batching and imposition and routes batches directly to production equipment. It controls the flow of orders with barcode driven workflow, creates bill of materials and picklists and monitors the performance of every machine and every person. This control is achieved all the way to shipping. Throughout workflow ZenSmart is capturing data, data that yields deep insight into where profit is made or cost incurred and feeding that data back to Cin7. The net result for your business is agile automation that turns production into competitive advantage.

Cin7 captures what needs to be manufactured effectively driving BOM- and work-order-based production. However, when production fragments into small batches, unit-of-one manufacturing, or agile, rule-driven accessorization, additional automation and control are required.

Cin7 knows what to manufacture, but not how to manufacture it. Specifically, it cannot manage variable orders with dynamically defined components. As a result, when work orders are released to production, they must be managed manually to move work through manufacturing, creating operational black holes and reducing visibility.

ZenSmart solves this problem across industries from apparel to merchandise, signage to drinkware, display to print, photo products, corporate gifting and custom goods.

It manages manufacturing complexity including:

• Use cases where orders have unique artwork and product characteristics
• Sub-products within a parent order
• Dynamic workflow routing and manufacturing automation
• Variable bills of materials (BOMs)
• Quality control and rework management

Its workflow automation capabilities provide the orchestration layer that enables highly dynamic manufacturing to operate as a single, seamless process including full machine integration.

ZenSmart integrates fully with Cin7, enabling automated order and artwork processing with variable data. It queues orders into logical groups, batches work according to least-cost and time-based rules, performs imposition with embedded barcodes and intelligent ganging, provides scan-based work-in-progress (WIP) control, supports real-time routing and load balancing, delivers item-level SLA tracking and rule based shipping, and provides comprehensive performance management of both people and machines with power business intelligence and AI tools.

Critically, ZenSmart feeds production status and performance data back into Cin7, improving operational visibility and business control. Inventory consumption is measured from actual production activity rather than assumed, while labor consumption is captured from observed production rather than estimated.

The result is centralized order control in Cin7, complemented by downstream manufacturing orchestration that reduces costs, improves operational visibility, and enables the business to scale efficiently.