Pre-production specialists e-media colour, wanted to ensure that when they implemented a total digital workflow, their system would provide the company with reliable cutting edge technology to enable growth whilst improving services to its growing customer base.

E-media Colour is an established pre-production agency, providing essential support in the form of creative, design, production and print to help clients communicate successfully and cost effectively with their audiences.

The company specialises in pre-press reproduction, catalogue production and data distribution. Its key focus is to provide an excellent and effective service to its customers through absolute commitment to deadlines, flexibility, instant communication and attention to detail.

"We decided we needed to implement a new production system for a variety of reasons. The key factors related to the capacity of our business and to the type of business we are in." said Mark Locket, Director. "Working predominantly in the area of pre-production for print, our business has undergone a dramatic change. With the advent of the PDF file format, we realised that for us, film would become a redundant media. We needed to implement a solution that would enable the company to move forward and manage the change to an automatic, fully digital workflow."

The company now runs an OPI/PDF production workflow using HELIOS and Cumulus software, running on Apple Xserve, with additional data storage provided by an Apple Xserve RAID.

"The key benefits of implementing this system are numerous. Our capacity has increased, our internal production cycles are faster and we are now able to offer image library services to our customers" said Mark. "Choosing the system was a daunting prospect at the time, but with the assistance of our Apple reseller, we were able to fully understand the benefits of the solution and how it would help our business. We were already aware of HELIOS and know it is a trusted system. So at the end of the day the choice was relatively simple." Mark continued, "The system is great - it's easy to use, manage and administer. It provides the flexibility and stability that our business requires and we know, as our business grows, the system will easily cope with expansion. We have been able to take on more business without taking on more people and although the service we provide to our customers is always exceptional, we are now able to provide additional, flexible services to our customers without any problems."

Managing Digital Assets
With their new system, E-media Colour now has the facility to archive in excess of 100,000 high resolution images, all of which are stored on secure Xserve RAID from Apple. Using Cumulus, images and artworks can be viewed on the Internet, providing an essential tool for their customers' Marketing Departments and Agencies.

Feature Focus
E-media Colour create many PDF types for many customers. Mark Locket commented, "Providing customers with flexible production facilities means you are always working to critical deadlines and so it was crucial we were able to use a system to simplify the PDF creation process and PDF Handshake has enabled us to do this." E-media Colour, is able to create print queues easily and these are published to its network. Operators use these queues to manage the type of PDF that is created. The type of PDF created is determined by specifications supplied by the customer's print company. The operator simply prints a file directly to a specified queue, the PDF is generated and the file is put in the user's folder on the server.

"The key benefits of implementing this system are numerous. Our capacity has increased, our internal production cycles are faster"