Drew Sprague and the art of keeping things moving

A printer has a speed. A document has a destination. The distance between those two facts is where Drew Sprague has spent much of his working life. It contains files that arrive in different formats, instructions that must reach the right device, and customers who would quite like to know whether their correspondence actually went anywhere. The envelope, when it finally appears, gives almost none of this away. Paper is an accomplished keeper of secrets.

Sprague is President & CEO of Solimar Systems, the San Diego company that builds software for production print and digital communications. His public conversations move easily between the small detail and the larger obligation: a page, a job, a device, a customer waiting for an answer. There is a certain pleasure in hearing an executive discuss where an instruction goes rather than where a market is headed.

A ten year sentence

In January 2002, Solimar announced additions to its management team. Sprague explained the appointments in terms of a longer horizon: “a business that will be as successful 10 years from now as it is today”. It was a sentence with a date attached. Eventually, the calendar would have something to say about it.

Solimar reached its thirty fifth anniversary in March 2026. Incorporated in 1991, the company had begun by helping organizations connect computer output to digital printing equipment. Its anniversary account described a business serving thousands of customers worldwide. The original problem had acquired more formats, more devices and more ways to deliver a document.

Those two moments suggest an interesting way to read Sprague’s career. Planning for another decade makes support, compatibility and maintenance part of the present decision. A customer buying software today may still be using some descendant of it when the people who approved the purchase have changed jobs. A ten year sentence carries a surprisingly long tail.

Follow the job before buying the machine

When asked in 2021 how companies should improve their operations, Sprague began with an instruction that would fit on a small piece of paper.

“The first step is to know your workflow.”

Drew Sprague, 2021

He laid out the journey: receiving work, reviewing it, changing it, scheduling it, and handling interruptions or damaged pieces. Manual steps deserved attention too. His advice asks a manager to look closely at the ordinary work before deciding what to purchase.

Consider the questions that follow. Who notices that an input is wrong? Where does a file wait? Who authorizes the next step? A purchase conversation looks different once these answers are available. Speed is easy to put in a specification. Waiting is harder to photograph. The people closest to a process often know exactly where it waits, provided somebody asks them about the actual job.

This is a useful entry into Sprague’s thinking because it keeps the unit of attention small. An operation is easier to understand when a particular document can be followed through it. The route gives the discussion a beginning, a middle and, with luck, a recorded end.

A file needs instructions

In 2014, Sprague was selected to speak at New York City PDF Day on optimizing transactional output with PDF workflows. The subject places him at a familiar intersection: a document can look correct on a screen and still need considerable help to move through production.

His later conversations with Pat McGrew turn to Job Definition Format, or JDF. A PDF carries content. A job ticket describes production requirements, such as which pages should be printed on both sides and which stock should be used. The details sound small until somebody has to correct them across a run.

Sprague’s practical advice in that discussion was to consider interface support when planning the next equipment replacement. Ask what the device and its controller can support, and plan for the workflows ahead. A procurement decision has consequences beyond the machine standing on the floor. It also decides which conversations that machine can have.

That is an appealingly concrete version of planning for the future. Before the equipment arrives, find out what it will be able to tell the rest of the operation.

The envelope has its own story

A production job and a piece of correspondence are different things. Sprague’s discussions of piece level tracking make this distinction central. The work involves following individual documents, connecting their records with archives and comparing relevant information with postal reporting.

Imagine a customer asking about one letter. Knowing that a large batch ran yesterday is only the beginning of an answer. The customer has asked about a particular item. The system must preserve enough detail for someone to investigate that item without treating the whole batch as a single, indivisible event.

Sprague also describes implementation as something that can proceed tactically: start with the applications that most need tracking, then extend the approach. Integration with outside systems can make the work more involved. His explanation leaves room for the actual conditions of a business, including what is already connected and what remains to be joined.

The human attraction of this technical work is easy to understand. A recipient rarely asks about the average document. People have an almost unreasonable attachment to their own.

Five ways to put things together

Ask Sprague about PDF assembly and a small vocabulary lesson follows. Concatenation stacks content together. Assembly orders it according to rules. Commingling brings different content together for mailing efficiencies. Householding groups material intended for the same recipient into one envelope. Merging weaves related material into a common packet.

The distinctions reveal the care of the explanation. Each operation answers a different question about what the resulting document should be. A loose instruction to put everything together could mean several things, with several different consequences.

There is modest comedy in the precision. An envelope offers one opening; the software behind it requires a glossary. Yet the vocabulary has a practical courtesy to it. If an operator, a developer and a manager can agree on the intended operation, they have a better chance of recognizing the intended result.

Sprague also points to the coordination required between operations and IT when deploying these tools. Permissions, resources and scheduling belong to the work. The document may be ready before the organization is. Clear language helps make that handoff a conversation people can actually finish.

The plumbing gets a vote

In a discussion of intelligent automation with McGrew and analyst Ryan McAbee, Sprague used a domestic analogy: “Solimar provides digital plumbing for the transactional printing workspace.” The connections matter because inputs and systems have evolved at different times, under different constraints.

His example concerns incoming PDF content that needs additional preparation. Adaptive logic can identify troublesome material and route it for further work. The idea begins with a specific production problem, then asks how software can respond to it consistently.

Plumbing is a good analogy precisely because the connections become interesting when they fail. You can admire the kitchen indefinitely while overlooking the pipe. Production software occupies a similarly awkward position in a presentation: necessary to the outcome, difficult to make glamorous, and suddenly everybody’s business when the flow stops.

Sprague’s automation discussion also emphasizes feedback. A system benefits from knowing that a job completed, rather than merely knowing it was sent. The return message gives the next decision something firmer to stand on. There is a substantial difference between an instruction issued and work observed.

A useful change comes after composition

Another conversation with McGrew concerns post-composition: the work that can happen after a document has been assembled by its originating application. It is a revealing subject for an executive whose company sits between document creation and delivery.

The appeal is easy to picture. A production team may need to adjust output without reopening every upstream decision that produced it. A useful intervention can live later in the journey. That makes the point of connection important: who can change what, at which stage, and with what effect on the finished piece?

In his article for BCC Software, Sprague applied similar practical thinking to personalized mail. He discussed automated address processing, presorting, householding and grouping smaller amounts of content. The argument ties software decisions to the work and cost of preparing correspondence.

These are everyday economics. Each envelope requires decisions about its contents and destination. An improvement repeated through production can matter even when the individual change is too small to impress anyone in a meeting. The meeting, fortunately, does not have to stuff the envelopes.

The work that stays useful

In the 2026 anniversary conversation, Sprague returned to stability and described his own contribution with conspicuous restraint.

“I’m just one cog in the wheel.”

Drew Sprague, 2026

He credited Mary Ann Rowan with building relationships and characterized his own role as largely in the background, working on products and support. The description puts an executive title beside a daily assignment. There are things to build, things to connect, and things that must continue working.

The anniversary offers a long view of that assignment. Technology changes the options available to a business; customers still need dependable answers about what happened to their work. Sprague’s public explanations repeatedly return to the point where those requirements meet.

A page reaches the right tray. A record can be retrieved. A question gets an answer. These are quiet endings for complicated stories. Sprague’s career has been concerned with making more of them possible, and with keeping the next chapter connected to the last.