Motorpress Ibérica

Integrating rigorous, detail-focused prepress work within a publishing company with an exceptionally high output volume, and making the process work seamlessly day after day, can be a daunting organizational challenge that would make any production manager’s hair stand on end.

Motorpress Ibérica, a Madrid-based Bertelsmann-group publishing company specializes in magazines for the motoring, sports and lifestyle sectors and publishes 23 monthly magazines, three weeklies, and a total of 500 editions a year. In 2002, Motorpress Ibérica had reached a turning point with its increasingly demanding prepress requirements. The company was still outsourcing its pre-press work to three different companies, each with an average of 60 employees working three shifts to handle the high volume. When Motorpress Ibérica decided to bring their prepress work back inside the company, they turned to Gradual Software for a complete automation solution.

With a workload that previously required fragmented outsourcing across 3 companies and 150 employees and at considerable expense, the company needed an automation solution that would be able to handle the high workload and thus optimize its current prepress staff by taking away mundane tasks and allowing them to focus on their specific area of expertise. Today Motorpress Ibérica’s prepress department is standardized using Gradual’s CaslonFlow automation tool. Under the expert supervision of 7 employees it now handles an average of 70,000 pages a year.

Tomás García, Publishing-Technology Production Manager, and Javier Gorines, Publishing-Technology Systems Manager at Motorpress Ibérica, agree: “Without CaslonFlow it would have been totally impossible to automate our prepress process. Implementing CaslonFlow has benefits across our organization: management recognizes the cost benefits, while our prepress staff appreciates the valuable time saved by automating routine tasks. Not to mention the benefits to our clients, for whom we can now turn around work in considerably less time. It’s a ‘win-win’ situation for every-one!”

CaslonFlow: an open, scalable system that ensures flexibility

CaslonFlow's flexibility was a key factor in Motorpress Ibérica’s purchasing decision. As a fully scalable system which can be implemented in clearly defined phases, CaslonFlow now enables Motorpress Ibérica’s production system to be linked over seven servers that work together, sharing tasks or distributing them – all without cumbersome implementation procedures, down-time in the production department or intensive training sessions for staff.

Tomás García emphasizes: “CaslonFlow is not a rigid solution which requires us to turn half our organization or work methods upside down. It is flexible and can be adapted to our specific needs – an enormous advantage because continuity and efficiency is core to our ability to deliver outstanding client service as well as the profit ability of our company. The solution also enables us to grow at our own pace, try new automated processes, and adapt the system to the needs of our company – without being dependent on our distributor all the time. I think this would be totally impossible with any other system.”

CaslonFlow can even link up isolated automation tasks that may exist in various production areas throughout a company, and as a fully open system, CaslonFlow also allows several different applications to be integrated without any technical restrictions. In a nutshell: flexible implementation and user friendliness are key benefits for any company who wants to implement CaslonFlow – on their own terms!

Motivate your workforce with easy as 1-2-3 automation

CaslonFlow allows companies to free up valuable staff to perform more complex tasks while the software takes care of routine processes.
Tomás García notes: “Our production staff is much more efficient and motivated since we introduced CaslonFlow. The software streamlines their workload by taking away the monotonous tasks they were previously compelled to do manually. For example: CaslonFlow integrates any application that is set up to watch a hot folder, enabling it to monitor what’s coming in, creating a process and archiving it somewhere else. CaslonFlow also has a configurator for specific applications that allows you to alter or organize what the application will do, without actually having to go into the application – you just do it directly in CaslonFlow.”

Manuel Asorey, Manager of EPS, Gradual Software’s distributor in Spain is delighted in making yet another client happy: “Even a metadata reader can be integrated, with reading and writing ability, so you can have a two-way flow and arrange things so that the production work is fully intelligent. The next step will be a single workflow, and then, depending on the metadata that comes in the files, the system will be smart enough to know which processes to implement”.

Tomás García appreciates the ongoing updates provided by Gradual Software: “Although CaslonFlow’s main task is moving files around, they are also improving the core of the application with new add-ons. For example, the ‘Scripting Module’ lets us interact with any other process, such as a database or a web interface, regardless of whether or not it is managed by CaslonFlow,” Javier Gorines adds, “ever since CaslonFlow integrated the ‘Scripting Module’, we've had even greater efficiency in controlling our workflows.”

Measuring the benefits

“Saving you money, saving you time” are more than hollow words at Gradual Software. According to Tomás García of Motorpress Ibérica, quantifying the savings achieved by integrating CaslonFlow in the company is easy. Considering the return on investment, including the savings in labor as well as the software and hardware involved, he says, “the percentages add up to 1000%.”

Credits

This testimonial was created in collaboration with Gradual Software’s Spanish distributor EPS (www.eps.es) and Motorpress Ibérica (www.motorpress-iberica.es).

PDF Version

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