Averbode Publishing Group
Getting 300 A4-pages print ready each day – with only 2 in-house DTP staff, is no small feat. Yet Belgian publishing group Averbode has two motivated, happy DTP employees ready to prove it is possible!
Averbode Publishing, part of the Averbode Publishing Group which has branches in Belgium, France and The Netherlands, specializes in the production of educational publications for children and teenagers.
Processing an average of 300 A4-pages every day, the company previously used its DTP department solely for the production of page-layouts for its magazines. In 2004, in an effort to save costs and streamline its workflow, the company decided to investigate ways in which it could take an additional part of its pre-press workflow in-house. Its aim: to be able to produce print-ready, Certified PDF documents without outsourcing any task in the production process.
CaslonFlow – the invisible helper
Following a thorough analysis of its needs, Averbode Publishing chose to implement four automated flows. One flow assists in converting multi-page PostScript files containing the page lay-outs via Acrobat Distiller to single page PDF files. Enlisting the aid of Enfocus PitStop Server, the files are then certified in function of the specifications of the responsible printing house.
A second flow ensures that all cover pages made in QuarkXPress, which are also used as illustrations for websites and other magazines, are automatically converted to optimized JPG, TIFF or EPS files with the correct colorflow.
The third flow ensures that all photos which are received by FTP are opened and saved as native Mac-files, while the final flow ensures that Quark documents that still need to be proof-read are automatically converted to easy-to-print low-resolution PDF files.
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Danny Frederix, IT responsible at Averbode Publishing explains the company’s position: “We have only 2 in-house DTP specialists, yet we wanted to investigate ways in which we could bring additional pre-press tasks back in-house to save costs, and on the other hand it was imperative that we would not have to employ additional people and also would not overload our current staff with additional tasks which would make their workload unrealistic. To us, CaslonFlow seemed the perfect solution to help us reach this objective.” |
Danny Frederix acknowledges that there were no problems in configuring the flow sequences in CaslonFlow: “The needs analysis we performed beforehand was much more intensive than the actual implementation of the software. The implementation was the easy part,” he smiles, adding: “our DTP employees are pleasantly surprised at the benefits too…They cite the remarkable time-saving as unexpectedly high. As a matter of fact, I think they have become the company’s most vocal CaslonFlow advocates!”
Frederix concludes: “With CaslonFlow it has all become so simple, really. We just drop the new page lay-outs in a hot folder and a few seconds later we see them appear as PDFs in another folder. We no longer have to wonder if everything is correct or perform time-consuming double-checks; everything happens automatically and without errors. It would be disastrous if we had to do this all manually.”
Return on investment guaranteed!
The thought behind CaslonFlow is simple but clever. In many sectors, including publishing, there is an increasing need for process standardization and predictability. The time and cost saving implications CaslonFlow brings to companies such as Averbode Publishing is easy to quantify.
“No more outsourcing to third parties, complete visibility across the production process, automated execution of labor intensive, time-consuming routine checks and tasks – the benefits are clear to see, both in the costs we have saved and in the motivation of our DTP staff,” says Frederix.
Credits
This testimonial was created in collaboration with ICT specialist COMIT (www.comit.be) and Averbode Publishing (www.averbode.be).
PDF Version
Download the printable PDF version of this testimonial here: download (PDF).