Worth Higgins Reaps the Benefits of Standardizing Its Job Processing
EDMONDS, WA—Nov. 3, 2011—Worth Higgins & Associates is the largest sheetfed commercial printing company in Virginia. Founded in 1970, the company has an impressive history of continuous growth and customer satisfaction, serving clients in real estate, finance, banking, performing arts, and more. In part, they credit this achievement to the ardent implementation of leading-edge technologies.
Steve Plourde, director of technology, recognized a bottleneck in planning and imposition. Too many workers and hours were being used for these tasks—the prepress team was spending 15-20 percent of its time building imposition templates. In addition, inconsistent planning resulted in delays in prepress, press makeready and finishing.
When Plourde saw that Metrix could combine planning and imposition into one automated step, he knew they could eliminate the company’s production bottleneck, standardize its processes, and dramatically improve job turnaround time.
“Using Metrix has introduced a new level of standardization to every step in our workflow. The speed, accuracy and consistency of Metrix-generated plans save time and raise throughput in the sales, planning, and prepress departments, as well as in the pressroom and finishing departments,” he explains.
“We print such a variety of products,” adds Scott Schoenwiesner, “that being able to standardize our plans has brought us huge time savings.” Prior to implementing Metrix, the press and bindery departments would receive three different layouts from three different planners for jobs that were otherwise identical.
“With Metrix-generated plans, all of the projects have consistent layouts and instructions, which makes press make-ready and finishing more accurate and much faster,” contributes Mark Chase. “We have dramatically reduced spoilage due to incorrect imposition.”
Everyone at Worth Higgins & Associates has felt the positive impact of implementing Metrix. The sales team offers its clients a Metrix diagram, which they use to formulate their projects. This pushes standardization even further upstream, along with predictability and efficiency. The planning and imposition teams have been relieved of repetitious, tedious tasks and now apply their time to more pressing strategic goals. Even last-minute changes are easier to accommodate with Metrix, where a paper stock, quantity, or press change can be re-calculated almost instantly.
“These days, you have to continually push to stay on the cutting edge of new technologies,” concludes Plourde. “With LithoTechnics, we gained an excellent product, Metrix, as well as a team that understands our business and where we want to take it. LithoTechnics is the type of business partner that has proven to be critical to our success.”
About LithoTechnics
LithoTechnics is a privately held company founded in 2003 by Rohan Holt. Holt invented the first production planning software for the sheetfed market in 1995, and Metrix, LithoTechnics’ flagship product, is the culmination of Holt’s years of print production experience and accumulated software design expertise. Metrix, launched in 2004, received the prestigious 2005 PIA/GATF InterTech Technology Award, recognized industry-wide as a symbol of technological innovation and excellence. With offices in Edmonds, Washington, Turnhout, Belgium, and south of Sydney, Australia, LithoTechnics is a software company focused on providing key tools and technologies to enable print workflow automation. LithoTechnics is a full member of the CIP4 Organization.
Source: LithoTechnics.
