After nearly 30 years as an executive with Sandy Alexander Inc., one would think that Howie Swerdloff would slow down a bit. But Swerdloff, who is the Vice President of Prepress & Quality for the huge printing and graphic communications company, is on a mission.
He is on the cutting edge of new systems that not only integrate printing and graphics solutions within Sandy Alexander, but will allow customers to proof their jobs remotely, providing great cost savings and convenience. The "centerpiece" of the system, says Swerdloff, is the Virtual Ticket solution from MetaCommunications, Inc., a leading developer of workflow solutions for the graphics industry. "We are constantly innovating with Virtual Ticket," says Swerdloff. "It is a tremendously versatile system that is easy to customize. It doesn't force you into a particular mode or model. It's flexible and easy to change, and that's critical in a dynamic industry such as ours."
A key enabler of this versatility, according to Swerdloff, is Virtual Ticket's ability to import and export JDF and XML, industry standard formats that allow easy integration with other systems.
Swerdloff says that when he came to his latest assignment three years ago, his first goal was to decrease the amount of reworking needed on jobs as well as the turnaround time for his customers. With Virtual Ticket he is accomplishing that.
Says Swerdloff: "Virtual Ticket is a way to instantly communicate job requirements between departments, between shifts or between plants. Plants today run 24/7 and 365 days a year. There are constant innovations going on. We need to be able to change things 'on a dime' and Virtual Ticket allows us to do that. It has the virtues of an off-the-shelf system, but it has the power of a much more robust and expensive system because it is so easy to customize. It's also extremely popular with the operators who use it because it has made their jobs much easier. Our programmers, for example, are using Virtual Ticket to customize and automate all kinds of repetitive and unpleasant tasks. Naturally, they love the product."
Swerdloff says that the future for the printing industry lies in automation, and that means systems that are interoperable. Automating each facet of a job using electronic job ticketing as a base is now a priority. At Sandy Alexander, Virtual Ticket is playing a significant role in the automation of processes. "Because Virtual Ticket is capable of generating JDF and XML," says Swerdloff, "it can talk directly to production machines. This allows us to reduce the need for human interaction as a job moves through the plant, speeding our workflow and reducing errors. Virtual Ticket is perfectly positioned for that and, in fact, is already helping us to achieve much greater efficiency."
Virtual Ticket is a way to instantly communicate job requirements between departments, between shifts, or between plants.
Howie Swerloff, VP of Production
Sandy Alexander is currently in the process of implementing MetaCommunications' Digital Storage Manager to augment its Virtual Ticket capabilities. Swerdloff says, "We have many clients in the cosmetics and fashion industries who have a large number of images that are reused frequently. With Digital Storage Manager, we will be able to provide enhanced services to these clients that will make it much easier for them to locate and re-use images." Swerdloff also looks forward to converting the company's physical library of image assets to digital storage, using Digital Storage Manager's powerful InterSync indexing and file management capabilities. He adds, "Right now we have a whole warehouse full of flat files with press sheets in them. We will begin to convert these as appropriate, bringing our image library into the 21st Century. Interestingly, for the first time in our history we have clients asking for access to their assets, to search for specific images, view thumbnails, proof jobs, download files and otherwise manage their assets on a 24/7 basis from anywhere with an Internet connection. Once we have Digital Storage Manager up and running later this spring, we expect to integrate it with an e-commerce system that will offer our clients the functionality they are looking for, and more."
According to Swerdloff, Virtual Ticket will help drive Sandy Alexanders's automated online ripping, trapping and proofing solution. He says, "Customers will be able to access our servers remotely, preflight, rip, trap and look at color accurate representations of their jobs from remote locations. Presently, physical proofs have to be shipped to the client, or the client has to come into our plant. Soon this will be done in real time in a color-managed environment on a monitor. Virtual Ticket is the tool that we are using to integrate job specifications into our Nexus workflows so that customers can do all of this on their own without any operator intervention, and without incurring the expense of couriers and overnight shipping of hardcopy proofs."
Swerdloff cites another innovation that Virtual Ticket has made possible at Sandy Alexander: "We have created a web site for our customer service reps so that they can find information on their own projects. It polls the database and shows a complete recap of the job, down to lists of all of the colors and pages, so that they can see exactly what's going on in a particular project. That has made their lives much, much easier. And with the Digital Storage Manager implementation, they will also be able to access images and other assets whether they are stored online, near-line, or offline in a tape library. This will be a huge time-saver for us."
Because Digital Storage Manager is fully integrated with Virtual Ticket, Swerdloff points out that not only are the assets transferred into a hierarchical storage system, but all of the metadata collected by Virtual Ticket is automatically transferred as well. "This means," he says, "that we can instantly locate materials by searching for any metadata associated with the file."
Sandy Alexander, of course, has a reputation as being one of the most innovative full service graphic and communication companies in the world. Swerdloff says, "We do very complex work here, and while we are not digital printers, the digital printing model has certainly affected the world of commercial print. Clients expect to be able to transmit a file via the web and have the printed output delivered the next morning. In order to meet those requirements, you need to have as much automation as possible in the process. Virtual Ticket is a major part of our ability to introduce that automation into the system, and to be able to stay ahead of the competition."
And Swerdloff is certainly not resting on his laurels. He says, "I have a lot of futuristic ideas that are going to come to pass in the next years, and most, if not all, of it will be integrated with Virtual Ticket. It is nice to have a job ticket, but what is really nice is using that job ticket to automate processes and drive devices. JDF is a big fad in our industry, and quite the buzzword. MetaCommunications' solutions actually have the capability to do things that others are merely hyping. We plan to continue to leverage that going forward."
