I have been working at Y Soft for nearly 10 years and still enjoy it. Who can say that? My job is interesting, challenging and fun! As a Solution Consultant my job is, among others, to design print solutions. And bring them to life. Just keep on reading to learn what my day looks like.
 

What the heck is a “print solution”?

First things first: so, what the heck is a “print solution”? Good question!

Printing is just a three-step process, which hasn’t changed much since Windows 95:

How can you possibly build a “solution” around this? Let me explain this through a story.

There is a company, let’s say a technological startup selling AI powered running shoes (because why not), which has a single office in Central Europe. This company just needs a desktop printer. 

As they are growing, they buy a few more.

At this point, they realize that those printers cost them a fortune (replacing toner, etc.). They are approached by a print reseller to get a big one (we call them multi-function Devices, MFDs). There is still not that much room for print solutions.

Our time comes when the company grows a little bit more and when they get a few of those MFDs. 

This creates a lot of problems: they have a large fleet of printers to manage (administrators), plenty of print queues to pick from (users), many points of potential data leakage (CIO), and very little control over print costs (CFO).
At this point, the company approaches a Managed Print Services (MPS) provider, who bundles a print management solution with their MFDs. This solution, our solution, addresses the above concerns.
If the MPS provider is new to this or if the deal appears too complex, they might ask for Y Soft’s Solution Consultant to help out. 

Solution Consultant @Y Soft

Who the heck is Y Soft Solution Consultant? Again, good question! 
The MPS provider approaches Y Soft to help them build a print solution design, especially for cases like the above. Think about it: 
 

• The company has global reach 

• Supports multiple workstation platforms (Chrome OS, Windows, Linux, MacOS)

• Wants to include scanning and OCR (Optical Character Recognition)

• Needs all systems to be highly available

• Has strict security 

• And, of course, follows the trend to migrate everything into the cloud

As a Y Soft Solution Consultant, I work with them to uncover (1) what they want and (2) what we need to do to get there.  
 

Y Soft Special Forces?

We, Solution Consultants, care for so much more than printing! 

Designing print management solutions requires the broadest knowledge of IT. You need to understand things like high availability and overall security, IAM, cloud computing such as docker or k8s. There are many communication protocols to deal with, networking concepts as well as OS knowledge are expected. Also you need to be a good communicator to gather business requirements; we often discuss directly with customers who might be new to this. Not to mention 3D printing. There is a lot more and every project brings a new technology to interact/integrate with.

While it is expanding, our core focus always was on the largest enterprises where implementation projects take a great deal of planning and require professional execution. Whenever needed, we roll up our sleeves and develop what’s needed ourselves, troubleshoot or test when documentation is lacking to get the job done. 

With this experience as the “front-line operators” we are consulting for internal development teams, helping with knowledge transfer and sharing about “the world out there”.

Lastly, our job is about knowledge transfer to partners and resellers, for which we lead trainings. Those can range from 1-hour webinars to 3 days on-prem workshops.

For sure, this is not a routine job!

Note: In the world before covid we used to travel a lot, but looks like we are more into remote whiteboarding now…

 

YSofters

Why do I do what I do?

What gets me out of bed every morning? I really enjoy the people I work with, the culture we are fostering and … well … am proud for Y Soft to be one of a very few Czech-based truly globally operating companies.