Ultimate TechnoGraphics Helps Cober Gain Unmatched Productivity

Building an automated workflow from imposition to finishing propels Cober Printing to new levels of success, delivering hundreds of short-run orders per day.

Short runs shaping a new reality
Cober, a family owned printing company located in Ontario for over 100 years, highlights the issues faced by most print providers today. “Cober’s digital print business was growing rapidly” says Erwin Driever, VP Technology at Cober,”as a result, we faced a number of challenges with these new opportunities, particularly where the volume of short-run orders placed and produced was increasing dramatically. Using the more traditional finishing methods of a commercial printer to produce these orders became a major bottleneck in our finishing area, negatively affecting our production processes, delivery times and customer satisfaction.” They knew they couldn’t keep up with this bottleneck any longer and had to completely rethink their processes.
Finding A True Game Changer
Cober’s plan was to automate the workflow including functionality for ganging or batching orders by like attributes such as size, substrate and quantity, and creating imposed layouts that would ultimately be printed as a collated stack and then finished by cutting on a traditional guillotine. This solution required an imposition application that would provide autonomous functionality. Cober selected Ultimate Impostrip® to automate their short run jobs and to increase their productivity. Major benefits in using this technology in day-to-day activities were experienced by Cober. “Ultimate Impostrip® provides us with a stable, efficient, predictable and autonomous tool for automating imposition layouts and files submitted for digital print production” explains Driever. “It is a critical component of our overall automation processes. The application is relatively easy to use, very flexible to meet our needs.”

Ultimate Impostrip® allows print service providers to capture the market and make a successful print business even while managing shorter runs and meeting very quick turnaround times. The technology provided handles millions of jobs from customers all around the world and unlocks true value. It offers a full subset of unmatched functionality to enable a wide range of production requirements.
“Ultimate Impostrip® is a very important tool and major component for the automation of imposition flats and files in our workflow. We tested a number of different solutions and nothing that we found could compare to it. Using Ultimate Impostrip® for imposition automation has been so successful for us that we continue to add new products and SKUs to our automation streams and inject more traditional orders using Hot Folder flows, eliminating the use of other “Prepress” imposition tools and manual interaction with orders.”, says Jeff Sider, Senior Development Manager at Cober.

True Collaboration and Partnership
Cober is now a successful Ultimate customer and their “overall user experience with Ultimate Impostrip® and Ultimate TechnoGraphics has been nothing but positive. The application is an incredible product to use” adds Driever. “It’s the actual efficiencies on the production floor that we’ve gained because we’ve been able to use tools like Ultimate Impostrip®. We are saving hours and hours in production time and generating products much faster, giving us the capacity to produce more and grow our business.’’ With the help of Ultimate TechnoGraphics, Cober produces now 1,000-1,200 orders per day, automated from receipt of order through shipping.

Post-press Automation
Cober has also implemented finishing automation solutions by incorporating the Horizon SmartStacker powered by HP SmartStream Direct-to-Finish. “The production process for these short run orders had been totally automated up to and including the printing of orders. It was a natural progression to look at automating as many of the post-press functionality as possible, such as cutting, to achieve even greater efficiencies.” explains Driever.
To read the full story and to learn more about their finishing choices, please visit www.imposition.com.