Chroma was the first online printing company in Poland to establish a comprehensive online shop - with all its tools and abilities - that revolutionized their customer service.
Chroma Printhouse is the biggest online printing company in Poland. At the moment they are the Polish market leader when it comes to online print, being the first to establish a comprehensive and transparent online shop for its clients, revolutionizing the way customers were able to order online print, with large amounts of customizations possible for each job, ranging from paper type, finishing, folding and numerous other variables.
Apart from being transparent, Chroma strives to be as efficient as possible in its printing jobs, which is a challenge if you’re getting over 1000 print jobs every day. For the last years Chroma Print was using software together with a dedicated team of experienced DTP personnel whose main task was to daily check all the imposed sheets that were being made.
“The moment you’re doing over 1000 jobs every day, you realize that this is becoming a very tedious and repetitive full-time job for them,” Andrzej Nowak, Deputy Director at Chroma explains. “The biggest risk for us was that we were not able to maximally utilise their experience to create a real added value to our company, so we started looking for ways to further automate our sheet optimization.”
Together with the Polish Four Pees reseller PM Software, Chroma started looking through automation solutions. Very quickly they started looking at a solution combining callas pdfToolbox Server and InSoft IMP to do test their sheet optimization.
“AutoImp, as our combined solution is called, is a system that based on the interaction of several solutions leads to full automation of the generation, analysis and approval of sheets for printing,” Arkadiusz Szymosz, owner of PM Software reveals. “The main goal is to generate the most profitable imposed sheets possible for a company. Together with the production system, all jobs need to be printed by the deadline, but also in the most cost-efficient way possible.”
AutoImp uses pdfToolbox to automate the entire quality control and preflight checking so only good PDF’s go through to the Imp workflow. Imp of course takes care of the sheet optimization and the creation of imposed PDF files. And AutoImp adds the ability to create rules on what should be imposed when in a flexible way on top of the Imp engine.
To fully optimize the workflow at Chroma, PM Software created custom formulas in AutoImp that create the ‘ideal sheet’ before it goes to the printer to avoid as much media waste as possible. Arkadiusz Szymosz: “the goal of creating the ideal sheet with these rules was to reduce media waste even further. Creating these ‘ideal sheet’ formulas for Chroma Print was no easy exercise, as you have to take into account not only the deadline, but all the different variables in all the different jobs.”
In the end PM Software implemented this ‘ideal sheet formula’ in AutoImp and did a test run at Chroma for six weeks, comparing their solution versus the current workflow with Metrix. After six weeks both solutions had calculated the same ordered area of over 3,9 million square meters of ordered print jobs and calculated the production price per square meter. The result? AutoImp was able to save over 10% of the price per square meter in comparison to the Metrix solution. Arkadiusz reveals: “Savings over those six weeks was around 243 000 PLN, which is over 54.000 euro that Chroma Print was able to save”
“After this test it was clear that the proposed AutoImp Solution was the way to go and that we would be starting the implementation with AutoImp,” Andrzej Nowak, Deputy Director at Chroma, explains. “With this solution we are not only able to save quite a bit of money, but we are also able to get our experienced DTP division away from the tedious and repetitive tasks and really use the full potential of their knowledge and experience to further optimize our print operations.”
“We were already convinced of the added value that Imp could offer printers when it came to sheet optimization,” David Van Driessche, CTO at Four Pees explains. “However, it’s great to be able to work with integrators like Arkadiusz who go the extra mile and want create concrete examples that give you real numbers. I believe that the AutoImp solution that he has made can create benefits for a lot of printers all around the world, and we’re looking forward to see where we can optimize sheet optimization next.”
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