County Labels sticks to efficiency

6 October 2005



Bringing repro in-house with Esko-Graphics DeskPack


Self adhesive label printer County Labels, in Bollington, UK, has brought its repro in-house with the installation of several modules of Esko-Graphics' Scope workflow environment, including BackStage, Plato Edit and DeskPack software. The company offers a full design service to a wide range of food and retail customers. It has three Mark Andy flexo presses - two six colour and one eight colour.

"Historically we worked with two repro houses who have provided a very good service, but more recently it has been our intention to become self sufficient," explains studio manager Nick Hope. "As well as reducing the cost of the plates, it will also improve our turnround time and give us control of every part of the job. It is sometimes easier for us to understand what is required because we are in direct contact with the customer rather than the repro house.

"The investment with Esko-Graphics is the first stage of the project and eventually we will purchase a platesetter. We want to do everything gradually so that we are fully competent with the front-end software first before taking the next step."

He continues: "Price wasn't the deciding issue. We wanted a solution that would keep pace with our future growth. The vendors we short-listed were equally impressive, but we thought the DeskPack software was simpler to integrate within the Mac based system in our studio."

DeskPack is Esko-Graphics' desktop packaging production toolset, which extends Adobe Illustrator's functionality on the Mac platforms with a series of powerful plug-ins, including the trapX interactive trapping tool, which uses the ColorStitch trapping engine on the BackStage server. Deskpack is an ideal tool for design studios like County Labels, who want an easy entry into repro using familiar and well proven desktop software without having to invest up front in expensive hardware and software, and extensive training. "Initially I thought it would be better to have a totally separate platform for the repro and the artwork but, on reflection, I realised it was much easier to have them both together," adds Nick Hope.

Working in native Illustrator, County Labels has found the DeskPack software relatively simple to use because of its familiarity. "I always use Illustrator in the studio for our design work because I find it a very manipulative tool," he comments. "Wherever possible we now ask customers to send us their artwork in Illustrator format, otherwise we convert it and then check it using the Check X pre-flight tool."

Trapping

All the objects, text, special fills, vignettes and CTs are trapped with the original design on separate layers inside Illustrator. The layer can be turned on and off and edited. If the original file changes, the trap layer can be deleted and the file trapped again. Trapping is done on the BackStage server, allowing operators to carry on with other jobs without moving outside Illustrator.

"I didn't want a system that only offered me fully automatic trapping, because I like to be 'hands on' to make adjustments when necessary," he says.

The philosophy behind the BackStage digital workflow is to increase efficiency by automating repetitive tasks and virtually eliminating operator error. This is achieved by the use of workflow tickets. As in a normal job ticket there is a definition of what has to be done, but in the ticket within BackStage, the means to do what has been described is also attached to the workflow ticket.

"I use the ticket editor on the Mac to input useful data like the grip sizes and whether the jobs are with cut back or not and store the information on the BackStage server," he points out. "I find these tickets invaluable because we often work on a series of labels, where the alterations may only involve a change of text or colour."

County Labels is currently using Plato intelligent digital plate layout software. It offers two approaches to create stepped plate layouts – an automated CAD based workflow and a manual layout workflow, which uses the step-and-repeat and alignment tools provided within the application. The advantage of Plato is that after digital nesting of the individual elements into a full size plate layout, the graphics data is added 'by reference'. Instead of duplicating the graphics data for every repetition step, Plato only adds reference to the original file, which saves disk space and speeds up the process.

The front end system was installed just over six months ago. "We've worked in tandem with the repro houses, who still output our plates and provide us with the finger printing for our presses. We've gradually taken on more and more of the repro in-house and in the last three months, we have become totally self sufficient," Nick Hope emphasizes.

"Because we can turn the repro round more quickly, it's given us much more flexibility in the press room. In the past the plates came in and, because the jobs were urgent, they went directly onto the next available press. Now we may have a window of opportunity to hold them for a day or two so that we can run a number of four colour process jobs together, making it much more efficient," he says in conclusion.



Contacts

County Labels: Tel: +44 (0) 1625 574422 Esko-Graphics: Tel: +32 9 216 95 79




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Nick Hope: “It’s given us much more flexibility” Nick Hope: “It’s given us much more flexibility”


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