Jupiter Prestige Group has completed installation of a Hybrid Software workflow system across its sites in Hong Kong, Dallas and Southend. It unites the the three sites under a single production environment and enables the packaging graphics specialist to better serve a growing customer base of global brands.
The investment covers 250 staff with Packz and Cloudflow applications to standardise workflows and enhance process automation, replacing a collection of tools and routines that had been developed in house.
JPG managing director Mark White says: “Hybrid’s Cloudflow system allowed us to retire multiple legacy production applications and implant a unified framework that provides the foundation to develop further innovative solutions that benefit, us and ultimately, our customers.”
The group covers the spectrum from brand identity, virtual imaging, photography, colour management and print ready file preparation at scale. One project involved recreating the artwork for 6,500 files for a client’s entire product portfolio in just ten months, completing 600 a week.
The roll out began last year with acceptance testing followed by implementation at the three production sites and training over the course of this year. That the software is hosted in the cloud and is accessed through a web browser has been key to the ability to unify the sites. A new app store like feature allows the company to share workflow set ups across sites and maintain a standardised approach for customers that can spread work across sites.
“The lifecycle of each file has become more efficient at all stages through our production studios,” says White. “We now control our internal approve cycles behind the scenes, removing the latency from production; the status of each file is fed back into our internal management information system automatically so everyone from management to the operators know exactly where and at what stage a task or project is instantly.”
Previously, JPG had relied on a series of AppleScripts to introduce automation to workflows, but this lacked the agility that the company has now gained. And White speaks highly of the Proofscope tool for managing the approval cycle. “It allows a streamlined paperless quality control process within production between our artworkers and QC operators, using just a few sole clicks,” says White.
Packaging has been a bright spot during the pandemic, accelerating the adoption of digital printing, especially for labels, says Paul Bates, UK manager for Hybrid Software. “We have seen that some of our label customers have enjoyed their best ever year during the pandemic. The uncertainty has meant that their customers have been ordering in smaller quantities and more frequently, which have been produced on digital presses.”
