Digital Workflow

[NGA]

Just wandering how you all have your digital workflow set up. we have a KM6500 and 2 KM1050's we got the capicity but we stumble over over ourselves to get the work to the printers. Right now we send every digital job through our CSR that is handling that particular account and then through our prepress department. it sometimes takes us 4-6 business days to produce a job b/c it seems like we are going through multiple extra steps. It seems like my current operator is has more set up time that "running" time. My dream would be to have a printer operator. a fulfilment/ finishing operator and a prepress op that handlings all of the digital work. how is it all working for you?

 

[Craig]

Much of the same here and would love to here feedback as well!

 

[lfelton]

That's a really big question!

My opinion is that the keys are (i) processes (we're ISO9001:2008) (ii) automation.

We're a similar setup, just a bit bigger + litho as well. We can process an order for a single book, manufacture and ship it within 24hours and at the other end of the scale we can guarantee to ship an order of thousands of books within 5 working days. Took a lot of work + money though and we're absolutely nowhere near finished (and never will be finished).

 

[mattbeals]

Smart automation tools like Enfocus Switch can help standardize and automate processes. It is no "be all, end all" but it certainly does help a lot. I'd be happy to talk with you about it and set you up with a demo so you can evaluate it for yourself. There really shouldn't be any reason for a job to take that long to get through the shop unless you are super busy, have a lot of manual "touches" on the jobs or some other reason. You should be able to get a basic preflight and fixes on a job in a few minutes. Imposition should be faster. The slowest part should be the approval/proofing cycles and waiting for machine time.

 

[UK Printer]

use of enfocus

use of enfocus

We have some awsome enfocus widgets active, we use enfocus PITSTOP and have some custom droplets that we can drag files into, all the PDF commands are set, so the files are for example converted to CMYK from RGB, all spots are converted to CMYK, use of 400% blacks are flagged etc.

The thing that slows me down is the imposition, i'd love to speed that up, we gang all our work, sending over 100 imposed grids to the platemaker during a shift, i don't know about imposition automation, anyone recommend anything?

 

[mattbeals]

With Switch we can put PitStop Server or Callas pdfToolbox inline with Quite Hot Imposing, Impostrip or Dynagram. So we can use your choice of preflighting/correction engines and your choice of imposition engines. If you have Quite Imposing Plus we can take all your existing templates (exported as XML) and use those with Quite Hot Imposing.

Would anyone be interested in a webinar showing Enfocus Switch with Quite Hot Imposing for general imposition and gang impositions?

 

[UK Printer]

webinar

webinar

Aye, i'd be interested in that

 

[mattbeals]

Great, send an email to [email protected] with your contact info and the subject "Switch & Quite Hot webinar". We'll get everyone together ASAP and notify you when with a date and time.

 

[lfelton]

Quite hot has the same (pretty good) automation functions as quite imposing plus. Thumbs up from us on it EXCEPT no intelligent/auto ganging (of course digi printers don't need this). We'd really like the best of metrix & quite hot in one product! IMO there isn't a set of "out of the box products" fit for anything like full automation yet, although the incremental productivity improvements achievable are very worthwhile, as long as you are capable of significant customisation or you work with a capable integrator & have deep pockets). The vendors still have a long way to go on this.

If you're just after imposition automation at the individual workstation, rather than at the workflow level, quite hot plus is pretty competent and reasonably cheap (each seat is about £500 I think).

 

[mattbeals]

You can do ganging with Quite Imposing and Quite Hot, it's just not as automated as Metrix. But it can be done. I am building a workflow for someone where we gang business cards and other materials. Maybe I can show that for the webinar. But using Switch we can do some semi-automated ganging. Even in Quite Imposing Plus you can do ganging of different jobs onto a master press sheet.

 

[arossetti]

Im just setting up Xeox Free Flow Process Manager and Output Manager at our location. It does imposition and a lot of prepress steps then sends it to one of our 6 production machines automagicly depending on run length, color/black ink, paper stock etc.

 

[mattbeals]

It's nice to have tools like that isn't it? Makes life a lot easier once it's set up.

 

[Tom McInerney]

Setting up digital prepress

Setting up digital prepress

Is there a specific path to set up for digital equipment prepress vs setting up for litho> We seem to be having a tough time and I think we are focused on litho prepress and missing something.

Are their specific workflows for digital out put only?
Am interested in digital prepress workflow set ups for Xerox 700's and Oce 6100"s

Please let me know what we are missiong
Thank You
Tom Mc

 

[Tom McInerney]

Do you have digital presses?