Pros and Cons Automation Engine

[bquarks]

Hi, after the last meeting at my company one of the directors ask me what are the pros and cons after a while using Automation Engine because we spend too much money to bought, just for you understand my company is located in Brazil and the 1 dollar is 3.5 real and we have a lot of taxes. What change at your company? So, I have only pros reasons, we reduce the hours spend in prepress and in last 4 years we don't hire anybody to prepress, and reduce the mistakes but I want to know how much the AE impact in our company.

 

[EskoClub]

Impact is huge and not just because of cutting-down the prepress time. Of course it depends upon the specifics of your company.
If we talk about the cutting down the time spent on prepress. It depends upon how much of manual and time consuming work your pre-press operators do. How do you preflight? File corrections? Reports? Layouts? Print marks? Export-import, conversion and......tasks? What about the MIS? And so on... Your workflow should be analyzed to understand what stages can be automated and what stages can be better organized. Only after that you will have some approximate forecast.
Error reduction: What is the medium cost of a prepress error? Do you have any? Kinds of errors? Is AE capable to avoid such kinds of errors?
Again, lots of questions to answer...
From personal experience: The impact of AE is huge not just because of time saving and error reduction... AE lets a company to analytically organize the prepress process, make it much more traceable and transparent - this is where the real profit is.
So:
PROs:
+Time saving. Approximate impact - you need to find the answers to the bunch of questions
+ Error reduction. Again, answers to the questions
+ Re-designed and normalized workflow (that is the real gold!)

CONs:
- Work to do on implementation

If you need any details - write me to PM

 

[afilsonCSA]

I will echo what the person from Esko stated. Using an automation tool is more about how you implement it than which tool you select. You need to identify what specific processes you are looking to automate, things like bleed detection, page size, page rotation, imposition, trapping, font handling, output intent, etc... all can be automated; so can your communication with your MIS system in most cases, as well as your downstream or post processing systems.

I would start with listing each touch point in your process and listing what occurs at that point. Look at which of these you want to automate, then look for the tool(s) that will allow you to automate that step successfully.

The Pros are normally speed, error reduction, process control, and reduced labor costs.

The Con's are, implementation, and initial startup costs.

 

[bquarks]

Normally pros and cons are the same. In this cases, Esko helped to the developer the workflows or somebody in your company had to learn to make workflows?​