Heidelberg's Prinect Boosts Production for Grafika

From left, Mike Hartman, Grafika's prepress manager and Bernie Elzer, the company's president.

Grafika, a commercial and package printer in Pennsylvania, is experiencing significant increases in productivity after integrating its shop with Prinect print and media workflow from Heidelberg. After attending the International Prinect Users Group at Heidelberg’s Print Media Center in Wiesloch, Germany, Grafika saw an opportunity to evaluate its daily production and maximize the output of each piece of equipment with Prinect.

“We saw a huge opportunity to not only feed information to the press for automation, but also send it back to prepress to track cost-efficiencies and production on a consistent basis,” said Mike Hartman, prepress manager. “It was incredible to see the dedication that Heidelberg has for integration and automation from the beginning to the end of the print process and their determination for creating a workflow that meets all of your production needs.”

Full Integration for Faster Production

After the initial installation of its Speedmaster XL 106-6+L with Image Control, the company opted to integrate with Prinect to better monitor the activity in the pressroom. Over the last 14 months, the company has also purchased a Linoprint CV and a Suprasetter CtP — all of which are connected with Prinect workflow.

“With our old software, our makereadies were averaging an hour and 30 minutes,” said Hartman. “We have been able to decrease that time down to just 15 minutes and drastically increase our productivity with the Prinect workflow.”

Hartman describes Analyze Point as a key management feature that makes Prinect a game changer in the commercial shop. With Analyze Point, management can review daily data against their business average and reevaluate each process as needed to ensure every job is running as efficiently as possible.

With Prinect Image Control, color management capabilities have also improved as operators are able see how consistent the color is throughout the run and job-to-job.

“If we see the color is starting to drift, we’re able to pinpoint the exact sheet count where the color is not consistent and adjust as needed,” he said.

For Grafika, Prinect also allows for powerful opportunities such as creating templates for repeat work with similar sheet sizes, the ability to easily modify bleeds and add variable data for packaging applications and efficiently import die files.

Future-facing Integration

According to Hartman, although its operators were skilled in its previous workflow, they certainly agree that if given the choice, they would not go back after experiencing the power of Prinect.

Now that Grafika is proficient in Prinect workflow, the company sees more opportunities for the future.

“We are now looking at other parts of our print process that we want to integrate with and we are confident in the ability of Prinect to do just that,” he said.

Source: Heidelberg.