Case Study: How NEBS Brought Prepress in House
Problem: Multititle business-to-business cataloger NEBS wanted to reduce catalog and direct mail prepress costs charged by its third-party providers.
Solution: Bring prepress duties in house.
Results: Prepress costs were reduced by up to 50 percent, for an estimated annual savings of more than $450,000. And production turnaround times have decreased significantly.
New England Business Service (NEBS) has provided small to medium-sized U.S. businesses with forms, checks and promotional solutions since 1952. The Groton, MA-based company now boasts a customer base of more than 2 million.
NEBS produces more than 40 catalog titles, with a total annual circulation of more than 57 million. Individual print runs range from 150,000 to 9 million.
The company’s relatively new Premedia Services team handles the preparatory work for all of these catalogs, as well as the company’s overall marketing efforts (about 10,000 advertising pages annually), says Mike Apfelberg who oversees the in-house service bureau.
Why bring catalog and direct mail prepress duties in house? NEBS’ officials set out to change their print strategy, with a goal of reducing prepress costs, first for catalog and direct mail operations, and then for corporate
marketing.
Earning Their Prepress Chops
“We brought prepress services in house for the Direct Marketing division about three years ago, and for the rest of the corporation about a year ago,” Apfelberg recounts. “We used to send out files in native formats to our service bureau or our printers’ prepress department. Then we’d get proofs back that we’d either ‘OK’ or make corrections on.” That process, he says, often took days of transit time and forced quality compromises.
But since bringing prepress in house, the process has been streamlined. “Now we supply our printers with our own RIPed files,” Apfelberg continues. “We transmit DCS 2 files generated off of our NEXUS RIP, along with contract proofs generated off of our DuPont Digital WaterProof or our Epson 7600 with DuPont Chromapro RIP.”
Apfelberg estimates that bringing prepress in house has saved NEBS 40 percent to 50 percent of the cost it was once paying for outsourcing these services — or more than $450,000 annually.
That figure takes into account the two additional staff members brought on board. “We’ve also invested in proofing equipment and RIP hardware and software, as well as color-management systems,” Apfelberg notes.
It’s also saved the company another important resource: time. “We can turn around pages in one-to-two-day timeframes, from files in to proofs out,” Apfelberg explains. “And we’ve been able to put in place automated workflows that have allowed us to put through as many as 200 pages in two days.”
Building the in-house workflow to produce platesetter-ready files has also improved the cataloger’s and printer’s ability to produce consistently top-quality print pieces. Apfelberg explains, “We have a very controlled environment, which is calibrated to the printing conditions in the printing plants.”
Native application files are preflighted using Markzware’s FlightCheck Professional. It verifies that the file is without flaws in resolution, color space or fonts. Those files are then fed to the NEXUS RIP, which performs an on-the-fly inspection of the DCS 2.0 file it produces.
The Premedia Services team relies on several stages of proofing for additional quality-control measures. “We do a light-table inspection of the approved laser and produce a Xerox DocuColor 12-generated digital blueline of our final DCS file before going to [a final contract] proof. These digital bluelines are produced in templates that clearly show type, safety, trim and bleed,” Apfelberg explains. “The only soft proofing we do is for content. We RIP to a PDF of the DCS 2 file, which may go to a client to approve content-only changes.”
The DuPont and Epson proofing devices are used for contract-level color proofs — the Digital WaterProofs for catalog pages, and the Epson 7600 for direct-mail jobs.
“We calibrate our DuPont and Epson proofers daily and maintain environmental controls for the DuPont,” Apfelberg clarifies. “We use only DuPont-certified materials in making proofs, ensuring that they are truly SWOP-certified. We’ve calibrated our monitors to our proofers to reduce the time and improve the first-pass quality with color corrections.
“Quality control is a very big deal for us, as you can see,” Apfelberg continues.
Challenges Overcome
Apfelberg admits there were some challenges to taking on greater prepress responsibilities, such as getting complete “buy-in” to the new way of doing things and learning how to use some new tools.
“I’m not sure we would have done anything differently, though,” Apfelberg says. “This has worked out really well for us. We were ready in terms of personnel and process development.”
He notes that getting help from his print partner wasn’t as tough as he expected. “The technology had evolved to a user friendly state. Our printers recognized that this was the way the world would go, and in order to stay in the game, it would be in their best interest to partner with us in this transition.”
