Business News
Democrat Printing & Lithographing Decreases Paper Consumption with Prism QTMS
Tuesday 05. October 2010 - A lean economy is driving lean business practices at Democrat Printing & Lithographing in Little Rock, Arkansas. Democrats customers continue to demand quality, service, flexibility and value. And value is more important than ever these days. By closely managing overruns, under runs, and roll performance with Prism QTMS, Democrat has exceeded industry metrics for waste and material cost as a percentage of job cost.
“Although this company is like my family, I run the business by the numbers,” stated John Parke, Chief Operating Officer at Democrat, “and over a year ago the numbers were telling me that Democrat was not performing at recognized industry metrics. My employees can only perform as well as the information that our systems provide them and that information, unfortunately, was minimal.”
In early 2010 Democrat purchased and installed Prisms QTMS production management system specifically to reduce their paper usage.
Christy Miners, Director of Prepress and Technology at Democrat says, “The selection of QTMS was driven not only by its capabilities, but by the turn-key installation that Prism offered us. Although we are a technology-savvy company, we simply didnt have the management spectrum to do this completely on our own.” Miners continues, “Prisms comprehensive application programming interface allowed us to connect directly to our own MIS, saving us time and accuracy in sharing job information between systems.”
QTMS is installed on two web presses at Democrat, including a recently commissioned Goss Sunday 4000. The flexibility of QTMS allows it to function identically on the Goss as well as a much older Fimag web press.
“Not only are we controlling paper consumption in the press room, but the press operators have done away with their paper production logs,” noted Parke. “Performance statistics are gathered automatically from the press through QTMS, and operators are able to enter job notes directly into the touch screen terminals.”
Prism QTMS is a turn-key production management system that combines software with custom-developed hardware that reliably counts copies on any material consuming device. Democrat utilized this hardware on their older Fimag press and was also able to take advantage of existing hardware on their new Goss Sunday 4000. The system is extremely flexible on the press side, while giving all operators an identical user experience at the console.
“Although our solution for Democrat appears to be custom when you look at the spectrum of presses, the capabilities of QTMS allow Prism to offer an incredibly standard process for the operators and management,” says Tim Daisy Prisms account manager for Democrat. “Its a custom solution from a standardized product.”