Esko i-cut Suite Receives Printing Industries of America 2012 InterTech Technology Award

Productive results from customers

Leicester based Data Image Group Ltd. in England was an early user of i-cut Suite. “Our company has grown 100 percent, but we have not increased our headcount in the art department. This all comes down to the power of the workflow. We use i-cut Suite on every job and could not live without it. Before, we created most of our cut lines and ganged artwork on sheets manually. The problem with most art files is that you need a shape surrounding the art. Unfortunately, most client files come with crop marks only, which are useless for our cutting tables. We had to reopen the PDF file in Adobe Illustrator to create the box,” explains Robert Farfort, Director at Data Image Group. “i-cut Layout lets us detect trim boxes, create the cut file, and send it to the cutting table. It has reduced the potential error of damaging a file.”

“Creating cut lines and ganging artwork for print could spend nearly a day for just one job. Now, it takes us only 4-5 minutes. It has hugely transformed what we do with artwork,” adds Farfort. “We have also seen a significant 10 to 20 percent savings in materials utilization, depending upon the complexity on job. We also found savings in print time. Printing a sheet on a digital inkjet printer, depending on the device, can take 15 minutes to ½ hour. By reducing the number of sheets we print on a job – for example from 13 to 10 sheets – we save 30 to 40 minutes of production time. Of course, that allows us to print more jobs and to drive more profits.”

Ad-vantage Signs and Graphics, based in Burlington, Canada, has noticed similar results. “We’ve only used i-cut Suite for several weeks, but already are experiencing much faster production. Our graphic designer said in some instances it is 75% faster than our previous way of handling PDF files and imposition,” notes Jeff Beaton, Vice President of Ad-vantage Signs and Graphics.

If Ad-Vantage was running multiples for foam core, the file sizes got so large just for editing that it took hours just to download them. i-cut Layout offers different resolutions. “With Illustrator we were transferring 1.5GB file sizes, and were losing a lot of time just waiting. With i-cut Suite, it’s 10 MBs. We get a screen preview, so we aren’t waiting for the files to keep reloading,” says Bradley Cousins, Ad-Vantage graphic designer.

“Just this week we received a job requiring us to print 30,000 2x5-foot decals with a lot of different artwork. If we didn’t have i-cut Layout to import the files and create the layout, it would have taken days to do it. Especially having to figure out the math of how many could fit on a sheet – all that is done automatically in i-cut Layout,” remarks Beaton.

“As print buyers have become more cost-efficient and reactive to marketplace changes, run sizes have become smaller, there is more versioning, and more pressure on quick turnaround times,” concludes Steve Bennett, Esko Vice President, Digital Finishing Business. “Before, the wait time from digital wide format printers would likely cause production backlogs, but printer speeds have caught up. Often, the production logjam is now on the pre-production workflow. In order to stay profitable, it is important to keep the digital presses running. With i-cut Suite, Esko offers ways to combat these delays, offering tremendous opportunities for productivity advantages to exceed demand. We feel confident that i-cut Suite will hold up to the expectations of an InterTech Award recipient.”