ProList was founded in 1989 as a database management company located in Frederick, MD, USA. Over the years, their offerings expanded into a variety of production services including personalization and imaging, mail processing and premium fulfillment. Today, ProList has grown to become a fully integrated marketing service provider, offering highly customized products in a complete automated workflow. Read how Ultimate TechnoGraphics has opened the door to successful workflow automation to this highly-regarded east-coast printer.
FIRST PHASE: IMPOSITION AUTOMATION
Originally not a traditional printer, the management team at ProList decided to invest in the Konica Minolta AccurioJet KM-1 Inkjet Press which combines the speed and flexibility of offset presses with the digital benefits of variable data printing and zero make-ready. ProList has been driven into this world with an increasing number of short-runs and variable content orders that came in from direct marketing agencies, cultural institutions, higher education marketers and small businesses, sports marketers created a painful bottleneck on the print floor, making impossible to continue the way they were. They needed to quickly find a solution to their challenges, and the KM-1 met those needs. To support this new powerful piece of equipment, ProList needed true imposition software. The team at Konica Minolta immediately suggested Ultimate Impostrip® to automatically generate the imposition and feed the press in a just-in-time manner:
‘’When we acquired the KM-1, we needed a more comprehensive and robust solution that would also make it easier to quickly impose any size piece and maximize the number of copies we could get on a sheet’’, says Dave Lokos, President & CEO of ProList. ‘’The power combined with the ease of use of Ultimate Impostrip® made it clearly the best fit for all our needs.’’
Previously doing simple impositions using their document composition software, ProList discovered the endless possibilities of control over marks such as bleed and crop mark that Ultimate Impostrip® offered them. But the main value they see in Ultimate Impostrip® lies in the time and cost savings aspects of it: ‘’Ultimate Impostrip® allows us to pre-set our impositions using hot folders so we are able to standardize the sizes coming from our Data Processing department making for quick and easy impositions.’’, continues Dave Lokos.
SECOND PHASE: FINISHING AUTOMATION
A new 45’’ guillotine cutter was also bought to handle the large sheet size of the KM-1 (23’’x29’’). In order to use its full potential, the team at ProList needed to find a way to automatically provide the cutter with the prepress data. They reached out to Konica Minolta for an answer whom highly recommended Ultimate Impostrip® in combination with Ultimate Bindery®. Ultimate TechnoGraphics’ finishing automation solution works seamlessly with the cutter by auto generating the PDF/JDF combo. ‘’It works so well in fact that it requires no interaction and is fully automated.’’, adds Dave Lokos. Ultimate Bindery® also helped reducing paper waste by offering the level of controls that permits precise job validation, doing the right cut on every order, all the time.
RESULTS
ProList has been using Ultimate Impostrip® and Ultimate Bindery® to automate their workflow from prepress to finishing for a year now and the results are already outstanding. They are now able to print approximately 250,000 pieces per day, the majority of which are completely personalized.
‘’The automation is a big reason why these products are so valuable. The ability to send our PDF into Ultimate Impostrip® and end up with not only a fully imposed file with crop marks and bleeds, but also a file to automatically drive our cutter has leaped frogged us ahead of our competition.’’, shared ProList’s CEO and President.
About Ultimate TechnoGraphics, Dave Lokos concludes ‘’The support we’ve received from Ultimate operating Ultimate Impostrip® and Ultimate Bindery® has been outstanding. Their team is truly dedicated to our success’’.
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About ProList
ProList is one of the premier mail and marketing services companies in the Mid-Atlantic region. The company was born of innovation in 1989. At that time, the Postal Service was just beginning to recognize the importance of automation in mail processing. ProList was among the first companies in the nation to provide a practical means of printing barcodes on postal pieces to allow its customers to obtain discounts. Our mission today is much the same as it was then: To help our customers reach their target audiences in the most cost-effective ways possible, and through a variety of direct marketing channels.
Direct mail is still our hallmark service offering. We have continued to expand our mail production services over the years, adding the latest technologies in camera-match systems for high-touch match mailing campaigns, state of the art inserters, and, most recently, the KM1, a large format digital, ink jet press. Today, ProList is a fully integrated marketing services provider that, along with its sister company, SnailWorks™, continues to grow and deliver cutting edge solutions for the many new challenges that today’s direct marketers face. From Intelligent Mail to integrated email marketing and digital fulfillment, ProList continues to make history as the model for marketing services companies of the twenty-first century. We’re always looking for smarter, better solutions. We never stop thinking about your direct marketing.