How Forma Certa uses Switch to run personalized print at scale
Forma Certa prints to transform. Three brothers in São Paulo started the company 25 years ago, and that idea still sets its direction: printing that gets more customized and more on-demand every year, cutting inventory, diversifying content, and doing it sustainably.
We don't believe in the end of print, what we believe in is print that keeps getting more customized and more on-demand
Fabrício Lemos, Forma Certa
From plates to personalization
Forma Certa began as a prepress bureau doing layout and film. By around 2010 it had become one of the largest in São Paulo, running four CTP devices and imaging more than 24,000 plates across a wide mix of jobs.
Then in 2012 the company changed course. Lemos and his brothers kept hearing the same problems from clients: too much inventory, not enough personalization. Digital printing answered both. That decision led to a partnership with HP that now extends across Brazil and Latin America.
Digital brought a different production profile with it. Last year Forma Certa handled more than 37,000 job orders, many of them B2B, and many arriving offline rather than through a web storefront.
For a conventional printer that volume can be manageable, because you have a small number of jobs with long print runs, at Forma Certa it works the opposite way. The volume splits across a huge number of jobs.
Fabrício Lemos, Forma Certa
Every one of those jobs still needs its files prepared.
The project that made automation non-negotiable
Six years ago a client arrived with a challenge Forma Certa liked. They wanted 50,000 hardcover books, each one completely different, one for each child. Thirty days to produce them, then delivery to schools in another state.
Forma Certa ran the whole chain: receiving each file, preparing it, printing it, finishing the book, and shipping it. One month, start to finish.
We couldn't have done it without a process that brought the automation to scale in record time. Working the stage that came before printing was the decisive factor in scaling it.
Fabrício Lemos, Forma Certa
The books shipped on time. Since then the projects have grown, up to 200,000 and 300,000 copies personalized one by one, alongside exam papers and other short-run personalized work.
Where the real challenge lives
For Forma Certa, the hard part is variability rather than volume.
When we work with variable data, that's the crux of it, you have to integrate APIs, keep the throughput up, and build new flows at different points depending on the job.
Fabrício Lemos, Forma Certa
Fábio Gabriel has spent 10 years at Forma Certa and focuses on digital printing. He has stopped counting how much he has built in Switch.
Today I can't measure how many Switch flows I have. Some of them run regularly, for products that come in every month. But I always have to build a new one when a new project starts.
Fábio Gabriel, Forma Certa
That is the point. A new client brief becomes a new Switch flow, built by Gabriel's own team, without waiting on outside development.
Our mission is to solve the customer's problem at the end of the line, for that you need a structure that gives you flexibility. Switch came in to support that growth.
Fabrício Lemos, Forma Certa
Automation that gives the intellect back
Ask Lemos what automation delivered and he skips the usual answer about headcount.
Everyone says automation means you don't have to hire people. Here we don't think about it that way. For us the gain is in cutting out repetitive work. Who enjoys pressing the same little button every day? Nobody.
Fabrício Lemos, Forma Certa
So the routine file work now happens automatically. Creating a bleed. Fixing a trim mark. Checking text. Checking a format.
His prepress operators spend their time on the work automation cannot do. Gabriel gives a practical example: adding a special mark to a personalized product so that whoever finishes it can pack it correctly and identify where it is going. Small judgments that need someone who understands the job.
I apply my human value to something automation doesn't do. That's the real insight. I cut back on what's repetitive and focus on what adds value.
Fabrício Lemos, Forma Certa
For anyone still deciding, his advice is to do the arithmetic.
Put the gains on paper, along with the time it frees up. Automation reduces the time you lose on the simpler things, so your time and your intellect go to what genuinely adds value, whether that's in production, in the creative work, or in administration.
Fabrício Lemos, Forma Certa
Scale without scaling the prepress team
Forma Certa's growth and its prepress headcount stopped moving together years ago. Switch flows handle the repetitive file work. The team handles the thinking.
If your job mix keeps getting smaller, more varied, and more personalized, you already know where the pressure lands first.
See what Switch can automate in your prepress. Book a demo at the bottom of this page.
