Prepress

Fotobooks A.S. automates its workflow with Impostrip OnDemand Digital Automation and increases web-to-print ROI

Tuesday 21. December 2010 - With two HP Indigo and a growing photo book business, Christoffer Reina, CEO of Fotobooks AS completed the plunge into high quality digital photo book production with the installation of Impostrip OnDemand Digital Automation, the most advanced automated imposition and tracking software for web-to-print.

Norway’s Fotobooks AS entered the digital print era with their acquisition of an HP Indigo 5000 Digital Press, but with the investment in a second HP Indigo 7000, Christoffer wanted to put in place a plan that would have one single objective: To streamline the PDF pages directly to the Indigo, without any human intervention and without any interruption from the time the PDF entered the workflow, all the way to the press output. To realize this simple objective, there were two requirements for a W2P workflow: 1- it has to be completely automated with job tracking and 2- it must offer unconditional integration of all software players: web orders, PDF manipulation / validation and imposition. Christoffer decided on Enfocus’ Switch and on Impostrip OnDemand Digital Automation because of its extreme ease of integration and high level of automation.
It is about doing more jobs in order to generate higher profits
”We were interested in a full integration”, says Christoffer Reina, CEO of Fotobooks AS. “This complete integration would remove the need to set-up parameters for different types of books. This process use to cost up to 17.5 hours of an operator’s time per week, doing what I call “monkey work”, work that is repetitive and work we believe a computer can do. We were able to recover all this time and eliminate all related costs. It allowed us to re-allocate our resources to be more creative, generating interesting, more complex and value added work. We considered important to reduce the human factor because of possible errors – that’s normal. Our Impostrip OnDemand Digital Automation can do it 100 x faster than operators, thus saving money.”
Good stuff doesn’t have to be expensive
Christoffer added, “We looked at various systems, some even 5 times more expensive then Ultimate’s Impostrip OnDemand Digital Automation. That solution was the best for us, because it has all features we needed: dynamic hot folders, barcodes for tracking, and very importantly, a fully integrated solution at a good price. We use Impostrip OnDemand Digital Automation to produce not only photo books, but also various commercial printing works such as business cards, invitations and calendars. We can get our files ready-to-print for the Screen CTP systems at the same time. It is easy to grow now, as our workflow is capable to absorb new jobs and an increase in volume in peak seasons without any additional costs; I can double production while I am on a Caribbean cruise and my presses will be rolling automatically.”