Brakes is one of the best-known, leading suppliers of frozen, chilled and grocery products to the catering industry in the UK. Approximately 95% of their printed and promotional material is created and produced by their in-house design department.

The design department provides services primarily to Brakes but also to other group companies. Predominantly the promotional material produced by Brakes' design department is for print and is dominated by high quality photography. The very large number of high quality photographs used in the promotional material caused real problems for the company's internal design team. As the number of images grew, the problems of storage and production processes needed to be addressed. It was essential to ensure they could continue to manage the increasing amount of material that needed to be produced.

When Neil Burton, Design Manager at Brakes joined the company, he had a clear idea of what he wanted to do to make the company's facility more efficient, creative and be able to offer additional services. "There were several issues that needed to be addressed," said Neil. "At Brakes, high quality photography is used throughout the business to illustrate the company's vast array of catering products. These are used in a variety of media, such as printed material, PR and promotion, web sites and presentations. Traditionally, our photographers submitted photographs to us on CD. The contents of these CDs were first catalogued manually and then archived in a safe. When an image was required, it first had to be found in the archive catalogue and then the corresponding CD on which the image was stored had to be found, usually in the safe but quite often CDs could be with other team members and that meant the CDs could be on someone's desk." All in all, a time consuming process! Neil continued, "With so many high resolution images being used, a method had also been created to down-sample images so that these could be handled and processed quickly by our desktop computers.

However, once a project was completed, the images had to be replaced manually with the original high-resolution images in order to submit them to an external printer. Although this process allowed us to work more quickly, it meant the overall project cycle increased greatly."

After much research, Neil contacted JPY and was put in touch with a local reseller.

He said - "What I wanted was an end to end solution that would provide a system to manage the production issues we had and also to alleviate the problems of managing vast numbers of images. I also wanted the system to speed up the production of printed material. This needed to cover issues such as speed of output to our internal printers for proofing and collection of final material for submission to external print companies." Neil continued, "After much consultation with JPY and our reseller, we were recommended a system that, at its heart uses, HELIOS to manage the workflow issues and Cumulus for image management. In effect, what we have is a system that delivers more time. This allows the Department to be more creative and productive, and enables the team to provide an efficient service that is now used by other group companies. The system does what it is supposed to do and we can create excellent promotional material without wasting time or money." Running on Xserve with additional server space provided by an Xraid, the company's complete production process and image library are easily managed and accessed by both Macs and PC's.

"a system that delivers more time, that allows us the time to be more creative and has enabled us to provide an efficient service that is now used by other group companies"

Brakes' design department runs HELIOS and utilises ImageServer for OPI and automatic image conversion. This is integrated with Cumulus to provide a workflow that delivers speed and efficiency to operators. In addition, personnel from other departments are now able to search for corporate imagery using their own computer. "The use of our image library has been extended to other departments within the Company and this has saved us valuable time."said Neil. "Before installing the system we were constantly looking for images requested by other departments but now, these departments can find and access images from our library for themselves." The system was quickly adopted by the design department and although the old time consuming processes are long gone, they are not forgotten. As one of the team commented "I find it hard to believe that work that normally took eight hours is now completed in one!"