Worth Higgins & Associates Reaps the Benefits of Standardization

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% of its time building imposition templates. In addition, inconsistent planning resulted in delays in prepress, press make-ready and finishing. When Plourde saw that Metrix could combine planning and imposition into one fully-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.”

“We print such a variety of products,” notes 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, adds 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 Steve 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.”