The history of Ripon Printers began in 1962, when the company printed and published newspapers. Over the years Ripon was able to grow into a commercial printing firm with annual turnover of more than $50 million. From its headquarters in Wisconsin, Ripon Printers uses high-end technologies to provide services for catalog manufacturers and publishers throughout the US. In recent years Ripon Printers has successfully increased the level of automation in its production processes, thereby bringing the company considerable advantages in terms of resource efficiency, print data quality, and cost reduction.

More automation at the prepress stage for greater efficiency in production and better print data quality
Back in 2005, Ripon Printers decided to automate individual steps in its production process using OneVision’s Speedflow Check and Speedflow Edit solutions. After a successful implementation phase, the company was determined to increase the level of automation across its entire prepress stage. It therefore added not only the data normalization and preflighting tool Asura but also OneVision’s Workspace Pro and Workspace Balance solutions to its production workflow. “The aim was to profit from an even higher level of automation, setting up and automatically running a series of modules, and therefore increasing our throughput,” explains Ripon Printers Prepress Manager Mike Thorson. One of the main reasons for the investment was for preflight as well as automatic correction of errors in PDF files. “We are currently putting through an average of 5,000 pages per week with a peak of over 11,000 ,” Thorson says.
 
Higher throughput as a key factor in corporate growth
Asked how easy it was to integrate OneVision’s products into Ripon Printers’ process and systems environment, the prepress manager described the workflow: “ Asura sits in front of our Prinergy workflow to clean up and preflight incoming PDF files. There are literally hundreds of choices you can make when setting up a workflow. However, once you get started, it builds upon itself and becomes easier and quicker to create new processes.”
Asura, Workspace Pro and Workspace Balance enable virtual preflighting and automated correction of most errors, e.g. the resolution of transparencies, color calibration, formatting alignment, etc. In the case of Ripon Printers, they enabled the company to focus more closely on issues like RIPing, trapping and automatic imposition. “We have been able to continue to grow as a company while reducing needed staff in prepress,” Mike Thorson says.
 
The fact that Ripon Printers was already using OneVision products influenced its decision to invest in the additional workflow solutions Workspace Pro and Workspace Balance. Mike Thorson therefore knew OneVision understood what Ripon Printers was looking for.

Under the terms of the maintenance contract, Ripon Printers regularly receives new updates for its software licenses and can therefore take advantage of new functions and developments. The US-based printing company also benefits from the support provided by the German software manufacturer. Although Ripon Printers generally needs little support, it occasionally discovers problem files “for which OneVision Support has pretty much always been able to give us a way to work with whatever we have been sent,” Thorson says.
 
“Asura is fast, effective and powerful,” Thorson summarizes. Asked what he could tell other commercial printers about OneVision products, the prepress manager recalls being challenged by one of his employees about why the company had wasted so much money on a piece of software. Just a year after implementing Speedflow Check and Edit,  the same employee told Thorson, “This is the best software we have ever purchased.”
  
About us
OneVision Software AG is an international provider of innovative and cost-efficient software solutions for the printing, publishing and media industry. In the past 20 years, the company has used its products to establish itself as the world market leader for prepress. Newspaper publishers worldwide work with products from OneVision and profit from the automation, the reliability and the resulting cost savings.

In addition to steady optimization of the existing solutions, OneVision Software AG continuously invests in developing new products and target customer segments. The company's product portfolio ranges from software for prepress to tools for intelligent colour management and image optimization to products for digital publishing. Well-known global players in their field rely on the expertise of OneVision and value the benefits they get from working with the software company: time savings, cost reduction and quality improvement.
 
(http://www.onevision.com)