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Product News & Updates
11/11/2008
eRez 5 has been released
eRez Imaging Server 5.0 has finally been released and is now available for download on the YaWah web...
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06/10/2008
eRez Global Partner Day
On Tuesday 7th October 2008 we would like to invite you to a Global Partner Day where we will launch...
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Turning Business into an Artform
The Art Group is one of the UK’s leading contemporary art publishers, producing work from top artists such as Jack Vettriano and Sam Toft. The concept of ‘Art on Demand’ forms a major part of the company’s digital printing output. Utilising in-store based kiosk systems or specially designed websites, the Art on Demand service creates a print of an image to an individual customer’s requirements without the need for inventory, consequently avoiding issues such as stock management, re-ordering, shrinkage and stock write-off through non-sales.
The Art on Demand digital output service is currently being used by leading museums and art galleries worldwide as well as key retail groups. If a museum or gallery has, for example, a temporary exhibition then either they or The Art Group will scan or photograph the original paintings in order to provide digital images to the pre-press department at the company’s London headquarters.
“It’s a long way from the original side of the business, which specialises in publishing greetings cards and posters, often for leading high street stores,” says Mac systems supervisor Dave Kesarisingh. “This still represents an important part of our turnover and brings us into contact with many artists operating in these fields. This work is invariably produced litho by printers that we have a long association with.
“One of the problems we were facing was the huge number of files that we had to handle on a regular basis for the burgeoning digital printing operation. Every image we offer is available in three sizes on either paper or canvas, which creates six products each with its own product code (and JPEG file for the kiosks or websites). If the image is one from a current exhibition, then customers could order further sizes from the kiosk at the museum or gallery. This means that one product could require up to 11 differently sized JPEGs for use on the website or kiosk and each one would have to be cropped and sized by an operator in our pre-press department.
When The Art Group sat down with its hardware and software supplier Square Group, filetransfer.co.uk's sister company, to discuss a way in which its workflow efficiency could be improved, they discovered that many of their processes were repetitive and time consuming. “The Art Group were very clear on their requirements and what they wanted the end product to be,” comments Paul Gibbons from The Square Group. “Together we identified that they wanted a streamlined solution that would help them gain that precious of commodities – time. After looking at various possible solutions, only upon sitting down with Artwork Systems did it become apparent that Odystar would be the ideal solution and fortunately we were in a position to help tailor the demo to the needs of The Art Group.”
Kesarisngh continues, “When we saw a demonstration of the Odystar workflow it was immediately clear that here was a way of automating the pre-press department, which would eliminate the hugely repetitive tasks we were carrying out, while at the same time implementing a high level of consistency and quality.”
Artwork Systems Odystar software is installed on Apple hardware supplied by The Square Group. This does not require the file submitted to only be from an Apple Computer. The software allows the customer to upload the files from any platform. The flexibility within Odystar has enabled The Art Group to design its workflows as hot folders so that its art workers can drop in files from their desktop.
“The first major job we produced after installing Odystar consisted of 168 different printed products. It would normally have taken us five days to get the raw files for the artwork to a stage where we were ready to print on demand any one of those 168 versions. Odystar reduced this to two and a half days and this was when we were still learning – a point demonstrated well when the next big job took one and a half days to prepare instead of the usual five,” concludes Kesarisngh.
