WebCenter 16, Esko’s packaging management solution (an online portal for creating, managing and approving packaging artwork and other assets) has been enhanced with improvements that bring added efficiency and productivity gains to print shops, trade printers and converters. A new content management module has also been added, which allows users to expand their artwork services. WebCenter 16 was introduced at drupa 2016. The new content management capability speeds the creation of packaging artwork by up to 50% by automatically linking content to artwork. This makes it easy to create and manage multiple variants and reduces the number of approvals and amount of back-and-forth communication they can generate. The re-use of text, including translations, leads to a reduction in operator time for creation and quality control of artwork – and can cut costs by as much as 30%, said Esko. Errors are also reduced by avoiding manual copy-and-paste of content, by centralizing content and managing rights and ownership, and through standardizing communication using global standards.
Automated review using technology from Global Vision provides Braille and barcode checking, plus text and image comparisons in addition to spell checking. This helps avoid costly or even dangerous errors being missed and allows users to concentrate on higher-level quality control tasks. Performance and productivity are further increased by faster searching supported by background indexing of assets, more efficient and scalable workflow execution (hundreds of concurrent users can be supported, with hundreds of thousands of projects), and support for self-contained import and export of projects and templates for re-use or easier sharing across sites.
