Procedes Chenel Beilken Digital Printing is a service provider for large-format digital printing, textile architecture and aluminium construction. Founded in 1990, it now has 250 employees at eight locations worldwide and supports its customers in trade fair and exhibition construction as well as interior design. At its headquarters in Lemwerder, Lower Saxony, Procedes was able to automate its prepress area to a high degree with the support of Impressed GmbH, a service provider and supplier of digital prepress solutions.
At peak times, Procedes prints around 500 PDF files a day. Until 2013, the company used to do this manually with action lists, which was very time-consuming. To reduce this, the print service provider decided to increase the level of automation in the prepress area. The aim was to check the print data more quickly, secure processes and avoid manual errors. Impressed implemented three solutions to achieve this:
Seamless process
Procedes also relies on Microsoft Dynamics Nav. "Our clerks in the technical department enter the orders received by email into the ERP system. Our web tool then reads the order data for further processing," says Jörn Kleinekathöfer from the IT department at Procedes. The data is then checked visually. If no anomalies are detected, the automated process starts with Enfocus Switch retrieving the data and calling up pdfToolbox. The software checks the incoming print data concerning resolution, colour spaces, fonts and dimensions. Any errors detected are corrected as automatically as possible. In addition, pdfToolbox integrates the output intent, adds print additions and replaces any special colours. It also converts the customer data into a standardised ICC profile via an integrated DeviceLink profile, which enables a color transformation directly from the source to the target in a profile - allowing better results to be achieved. The data supplied by the customer is thus made suitable for the specific production conditions at Procedes.
Hardly any manual intervention
"As soon as the customer data is available in our web tool, the subsequent process including checking, correcting and editing the PDFs up to printing is automated," explains Carsten Uebermuth, Head of Prepress at Procedes. To save time, his employees fill out the system at the end of the working day so that they can print the processed data immediately the next morning. They only have to intervene manually in the event of error messages. "Overall, we have been able to increase the performance of processing incoming print data by at least 50 %, so we are no longer reaching capacity limits," says Carsten Uebermuth. The quality of the supplied print files has also improved in general. Just a few years ago, for example, font problems were commonplace. Procedes also benefits from the fact that customers and agencies have now built up expertise and are already delivering higher-quality files.
A look into the future
Procedes wants to further increase the level of automation in the prepress area and is working on a way for customers to upload print data directly for specific orders. This would eliminate the need to manually enter orders into Microsoft Dynamics Nav, which is currently still received by e-mail. The company is also planning to pass on the expertise built up at its headquarters to other locations so that they too can automate their prepress operations.
