Sapro - Germany

In the cutthroat printing industry, handling a high volume of business at peak productivity is not a luxury – it is a competitive necessity. SAPRO, a top performer in the German print media sector, relies on a winning combination of smart organizational strategy and an optimized, fully automated workflow to maintain its distinct competitive advantage.

A classical full-service company for ad composition, layout, page make-up, scanning and digital ad editing, SAPRO must process over 2,500 ads every day and print more than 2,500 pages for leading German newspapers and magazines each week. Finding a flexible and reliable automation software solution that allows SAPRO to create customized flows which are perfectly adapted to their customers’ needs was of paramount importance to the company.

Finding the right tool for the job

Finding a flexible automation solution that ensures an accurate flow of ads between all parties in the production process and that can be purchased, installed and fully operational in only one week – without any disruptions for the client – is no mean feat.
“Top class customer service is part of SAPRO’s core values. We even have an in-house call centre dedicated to the customers of our customers and we are always looking for ways in which to further improve the service levels we can provide to our clientele. To us, it was of vital importance to find an automation solution that didn’t require us to turn our whole production process upside down and on which we could depend to offer our customers even faster service and to gain valuable time saving,” says General Manager Markus Schulz.

And the winner is… CaslonFlow!

“Workflow is the key to maximizing the efficiency and flexibility of SAPRO’s production process. I noticed an immediate improvement in our production process when we began running CaslonFlow,” says Markus Schulz.
“Although we developed a sophisticated ad workflow which operates nearly 40 different flows with CaslonFlow, I was impressed to see how clearly it visualized all the different flows and their elements. Control and error analysis have never been this transparent or easy!”

For the past year, SAPRO has been using CaslonFlow to implement full automation over its publishing activities, from document creation to delivery. CaslonFlow controls the path of the files through the workflow, triggers conversion operations, such as EPS to PDF and vice versa, executes data validations, manages data transmission via FTP and sends verification messages.

SAPRO also uses CaslonFlow to control the automatic e-mailing of proof sheets. “A dedicated line connects the three SAPRO offices and data is transmitted by e-mail, ISDN or FTP. Production is handled here at our headquarters and CaslonFlow monitors the various in-boxes and automatically transmits data to the right flow. The time saved by automating these rudimentary checks and tasks is of immeasurable value to us,” says Schulz.

“CaslonFlow has even enabled us to code the receipt of data according to the number of colors in the final newspaper print, which in the print shop is very important, as the colors in a customer’s workflow must be renamed so that absolute identification is possible at all times."

Credits

This testimonial was created in collaboration with Impressed (www.impressed.de) and SAPRO (www.sapro.de).

PDF Version

Download the printable PDF version of this testimonial here: download (PDF).