On the final afternoon of Printing United Expo in Orlando, Wayne Beckett from INKISH stopped by the Enfocus booth to speak with Piet de Pauw from Enfocus. With only a few hours left before the show closed, Piet was still full of energy. “It’s been a good show as always,” he said. “Honestly, this is my favorite show of the year. The organization is fantastic, and we partner with many other vendors here. We’ve got six partnerships on display this time, alongside many others at the show. It’s been an amazing run.” Wayne noted that collaboration seemed to be a big part of Enfocus’s approach. “Absolutely,” Piet replied. “That’s the heart of what we do. For example, we’re working with Kongsberg here at the show, demonstrating how our solutions tie together. We’re showing two things in particular—our Mini MIS, which we launched at last year’s Printing United in Atlanta, and this year we’ve added a layer of magic to it. Instead of just uploading a picture and removing the background with AI, we now turn it into a magic version of yourself. We’ve even designed a playable card game where your picture becomes one of the cards you can take home.” After a laugh about the “magic” theme, Wayne asked for an overview of what Enfocus software actually does. “Switch is built to be open at its core,” Piet explained. “I like to joke that Switch doesn’t do anything—of course, it does a lot—but what it really does is connect best-in-class systems. A modern printer has to invest in a wide range of software: imposition, MIS, web-to-print, prepress, finishing automation, and more. That creates a complex tech stack. Printers don’t necessarily want to spend time figuring out how to make all those systems talk to each other—they just want things to work. That’s where Switch comes in. It ties everything together, seamlessly. The best Switch installations are the ones where users forget it’s even there—it just runs quietly in the background doing all the work.” Wayne asked how that applied specifically to the partnership with Kongsberg. Piet smiled and grabbed a sample. “Let me show you,” he said. “Imagine you take a full-body picture at a family gathering and you want to turn it into a life-size cutout. Normally, that’s a long process—you’d use Photoshop to edit the photo, clean the lighting, cut out the background, and then generate a cut path, which takes time. In Switch, it takes 30 seconds.” He explained how the workflow operates: “You upload the image, and Switch sends it to an AI tool that removes the background. It’s then automatically enhanced by Viesus software, which adjusts lighting and image quality. After that, the file goes into PitStop, which generates a smooth, accurate cut path—because if there are thousands of points, the cutting table either crashes or takes forever. We smooth those lines, add the base, and send it to our nesting software, Griffin, where we nest the file on a 48x96 sheet. The whole thing—photo cleanup, enhancement, layout, nesting, and cut prep—happens automatically. At this show, the printed sheets go to the Digitech booth for printing, and then to Kongsberg for cutting. From photo to finished, cut-ready file—30 seconds flat.” Wayne laughed. “That’s incredible.” Piet nodded. “It is. That’s the power of automation when all the systems work together. It saves time, eliminates repetitive manual work, and lets people focus on creativity rather than file prep. That’s the magic behind Switch.” Wayne smiled. “Well, Piet, as always, it’s great to see you. I think next year you’ll have to make the theme a bit more obvious.” Piet laughed. “We’ll work on that for next year. Always a pleasure, Wayne.”