Reduce errors! Increase process reliability! Given the charge, VN Reproduction & Kommunikation GmbH, North Rhine-Westphalian, Germany, set out to implement a solution.
Its two-fold objective: Find and alleviate mistakes at the prepress stage. Guarantee customers the very best quality assurance.
Competitive dynamics, demanding designs, shortened product lifecycles, increased calls for sustainable practices and sustainable products, list out among modern day packaging dynamics to deal with. Being familiar with them all, VN Repro maintains, “Extraordinary flexibility is the order of the day!”
Why? “Multilingualism, shorter time-to-market, frequently changing artwork, constantly changing regulations; as well as compliance with sensitive information, such as sales description, allergens or nutritional values, present challenges in quality control during prepress.
Photo courtesy of EyeC GmbH
VN now masters these tasks thanks to its decision to install a reliable and easy-to-configure automation solution for text and artwork. The system is positioned to serve as an alternative to time-consuming and personnel-intensive manual checking processes. Its aims are specific: reduce cost-intensive prepress correction loops, while exceeding customer demands for reproducible product quality.
Essential Move
With decades of experience in the development of creative packaging and adaptation designs for customers in the food production sector—and proven expertise in folding boxes and cardboard packaging, VN recognizes when an essential move, like integrating a completely cloud-based text comparison and artwork proofreading system—EyeC ProofText—into the workflow is necessary.
“Manual proofreading does not always find 100 percent of all deviations. However, an error slip cannot happen since the follow-up costs, due to customer complaints, can be enormous,” explained Jens Fechtel, media technician and customer advisor at VN. “Looking to increase productivity, minimize human error, and reduce complaints, we embrace automation. Along with the highest possible level of user-friendliness, the new tool helps put an end to the days of location-based work, so remote or hybrid work is possible.”
He remembered, “A change in our inspection capability was urgently needed. EyeC tailor-made our innovative solution to achieve our main goal of ‘First Time Right.’ Experts listened to us and immediately understood our requirements—so we now have a fully automated text comparison and artwork proofreading system.”
Confidence Builder
The web-based artwork proofreading system compares the customer’s proof with the final artwork file; plus, an intelligent algorithm finds and evaluates discrepancies between documents, including text content and font—regardless of position, structure, and style—even for the most complex work in a single process step.
Intuitive usability of the system, side-by-side with the innovative user interface, routes, checks and evaluates complex documents quickly and efficiently. Time can be saved and costs reduced by checking several documents and different languages at the same time. After each job is completed, ProofText creates a detailed audit report for tracking and quality assurance. By improving the entire testing process, lengthy revision cycles are effectively reduced and the entire prepress process is accelerated.
Five employees currently use the automated tool as an effective supplement to the manual checking process in work preparation and quality assurance. From the first design briefing through each intermediate check, to final artwork, each piece is checked. Any discrepancies found are corrected internally and then checked again if necessary.
“Operators have as little manual reworking to do as possible and the employees in work preparation and quality assurance can concentrate on other things in the final inspection,” described the media technician.
“Since the software is offered as a SaaS application, it integrates into the company workflow without much administrative effort,” said Fechtel. What is SaaS? “Software as a service” is a way of delivering applications over the internet—as both amenity and benefit. Instead of installing and maintaining software, clients access it via the Internet, freeing the organization from complex software and hardware management.
Next Steps
“Increase in quality within the product development process, allows us to make a significant contribution to reducing the time-to-market—a key success factor for our customers,” emphasizeed Fechtel. “Reductions in errors and the associated correction loops in the final artwork process facilitate faster test cycles and increased productivity. High and consistent quality offers increased process reliability.”
In the future VN plans to use the EyeC ProofText more intensively. Stepping beyond five current users, is also in the cards. Other operators are to be trained in how to use the system to increase process reliability and confidence.
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