Consultants, dealers and OEM support staff are important stakeholders in the Fiery community. In most cases, they are the first line of support for Fiery users—helping them make the initial buying decisions, assisting in choosing the best modules to add as the business grows, and helping to resolve any issues that arise. They also have a direct line to Fiery engineers when that level of support is needed. And their feedback on potential fixes and future capabilities is an important part of Fiery’s product development process.

We recently spoke with Meredith Nichols of Nichols Associates, who is Fiery Certified as well as a Certified G7 Expert. She was kind enough to share with us her insight and expertise as it relates to Fiery, color management, and many other important topics for printing businesses.

WhatTheyThink:  Meredith, thanks for joining us today. You have quite an impressive background in the industry. Tell us about that.

Meredith Nichols:  I’ve been fortunate to work for some of the larger independently owned commercial printers in New England, including Dynagraf, Allied Printing Services, and most recently, Flagship Press, always in the position of Director of Technology Development and Color Management. These are two things you don’t always think go together, but they really do, kind of like using the left and right sides of the brain together. Especially at Flagship, we did some really innovative things with workflow and automating processes. Those efforts really paid off during the pandemic because of the process efficiencies we had in place. Before the pandemic hit, we had 11 people. After the dust settled, we ended up with five people, producing the same amount of work or more.

WTT:  How does Fiery help with workflow automation and streamlining production?

MN:  You can do some amazing things with digital presses, Fiery DFEs, and Fiery Command WorkStation. That includes connecting to other systems, such as Kodak Prinergy rules-based automation, and you can use Enfocus Switch as well for automation. So it can be an entirely integrated operation from prepress all the way through to finishing the job. That enables you to do more with fewer people.

WTT:  Can you add a bit more color, so to speak?

MN:  Sure. Between rules-based automation, Fiery Impose, and Fiery Hot Folders, you can take out many manual steps. This can be especially important if you have a lot of work coming in through online storefronts. Just combining some automation with Enfocus Switch with Fiery Impose is powerful; that alone can eliminate at least three touches in the production process. Before, you had a CSR touch it, you'd have a prepress person touch it, then you'd have a digital operator touch it. Now, one person touches it, the person that's producing the job. The next person that touches it is finishing it and putting it in a box to go out the door. That means you can handle an increasing amount of work with a smaller workforce.

WTT:  I’m sure you have seen other situations with clients where the process was not so integrated. What are the pros and cons there?

MN:  I was recently at a client site where they installed a Xerox Iridesse with Command Workstation, and they are doing pretty well. But they didn’t have a connection between Prinergy and Fiery. The manual workflow this required took minutes and minutes per job, drag and drop, drag and drop. By the end of the day, we had set up a remote volume on their server and Hot Folders on the Fiery, and we were sending pages for imposition to Fiery Impose, or they could do imposed PDFs on Prinergy. This will save them hundreds of hours per year. They already had both Fiery and Prinergy, and we were able to implement this automation in a couple hours. So the investment paid off immediately and will continue to deliver returns, in time savings, accuracy, time to market, better printer utilization, and, of course, profitability.

WTT:  So it seems like a good first step is to assess the current situation, including how long it takes to process different types of jobs, and then just do the math to determine what it would mean to integrate the systems in the way you describe? Even if they don’t have Prinergy or some other prepress solution, could just enabling Fiery workflow suite elements such as Hot Folders, JobFlow, JobMaster and Impose, as examples, deliver those kind of results as well?

MN:  Absolutely. Each shop will be configured slightly differently, but a common thread for shops that have Fiery is the consistent user interface and the scalability of the servers. By taking advantage of the automation opportunities, they can really make a difference in their production process.

WTT:  Can you provide an example from your experience here?

MN:  Sure. At Flagship, we were having a very difficult time with a Xerox iGen that was running, at the time, on their proprietary DFE, FreeFlow. The press was literally down for six months; and finally, the rep offered us the opportunity to switch to the Fiery DFE. All along, we thought the iGen was the problem. It turned out the DFE was the problem. Once we switched, the performance on the press dramatically improved. I think our experience encouraged the Xerox reps to more frequently recommend a Fiery DFE. And now, of course, Fiery has acquired FreeFlow, so basically, they all ship with Fiery now.

WTT:  Fiery has relationships, many of them long term, with a number of OEMs. They say that each Fiery server is tuned to the specific brand and model of printer it will front end. How important is that?

MN:  That’s a huge benefit. As an independent consultant now with Nichols Associates, it’s a huge benefit because while Fiery is purposely built to support a specific printer by enabling the features and capabilities of that printer, the primary user interface, Command Workstation, and all of the workflow tools, are common across all Fiery platforms It’s not a completely different product that's going be in front of a wide format printer, an inkjet printer, a toner printer. The workflow will be the same, and the user interface is familiar. For me as a consultant, it's a huge benefit. It's tight; it’s tailored for the specific device; yet the tools and the controls are so similar that even if I never worked on, say, an EFI VUTEk, within a matter of matter of 10 minutes, five minutes, the tool set's so familiar, that I’m off and running. It’s super intuitive, and especially effective when the client bundles it with, for example, Impose and color management tools.

WTT:  The other trend, of course, where shops used to be Xerox shops or Canon shops or Ricoh shops, now they are more likely to be multi-vendor shops. How does Fiery help that be more effective?

MN:  That’s another thing I love about Fiery and Command Workstation. You can control any Fiery-Driven printer from Command Workstation regardless of make, model or type of printer, within the shop and across multiple locations as well. It also helps with load-sharing, being able to seamlessly direct work to the most optimum printer for the job.

WTT:  It sounds like this could also help with acquiring and retaining talent in a tough job market.

MN:  If you find an experienced operator, it is very likely they are already familiar with Fiery. And even if they are now working with a different type of Fiery-Driven device, for example a wide-format printer where they have been working with toner before, the transition is very smooth. When you can simplify the process by using automation templates and workflow templates on a Fiery, it’s very easy to get an inexperienced person up to speed very, very quickly as well. I think that’s one of the reasons Nichols Associates has taken off in the last few months—our approach is to refine and automate processes so both experienced and inexperienced operators can operate more efficiently.

WTT:  Just curious, are you Fiery Certified?

MN:  Absolutely, and I encourage my clients to pursue certification as well. For me, being Fiery Expert Certified adds a level of credibility that is important to my business. Plus, Fiery has an amazing library of online training, webinars, and more, and it doesn’t cost a fortune. It’s an excellent way to bring new employees up to speed and to refresh the knowledge of more experienced employees. Especially in this tight job market, it is important for employers to invest in their employees, and this is a great way to do that.

WTT:  Anything else you would like to add about your experience with Fiery, and how it has helped your business and that of your clients?

MN:  Let me preface this by saying I’m not an IT person or a hardware person, but in my experience, Fiery’s compression algorithms and the way they allocate RAM is far superior to other DFEs I have had experience with. I think a Fiery DFE will outperform another manufacturer’s DFE, even if the competitor has twice the amount of RAM. More RAM in this technology does not necessarily mean more, faster or better performance. It just doesn’t. Another example is processing vector files. I ran some tests on some very large and expensive prepress systems, and sent the same file to those systems and to the Fiery. The Fiery processed the file in minutes without issue, as opposed to a larger prepress workflow that struggled for 15 to 20 minutes to process the file. Just consider, if a client is processing 8,000 jobs per year, and they can save 10 minutes per job, that adds up. In fact, just that small savings per job adds up to the cost of a full-time-equivalent employee over a year. Also, now that Fiery is an independent company, one could assume that more OEMs will partner with them.