Perry Judd's is one of North America's most respected magazine and catalog printers. Based in Waterloo Wisconsin, the firm is known for its great service and name-brand clients. Graphic Arts Monthly recently published an article about the company's investments in technologies that cut production costs while integrating their customers into Perry Judd's workflow. Here's an excerpt:

The high-profile, brand-name work produced by Perry Judd's is found in millions of homes and businesses around the world. With $260 million sales of publications and catalogs produced in three facilities (Baraboo, WI; Spencer, IA; and Strasburg, VA), the company maintains a central prepress facility in Madison, WI, to serve all three printing sites.

Perry Judd's developed a client job submission system—branded as FlashPoint—using Web-based interactive interfaces for preflighting, RIPping and proofing. Customers drop pages directly into the system.

"Customers can drop hundreds of pages in the evening before they go home and will have proofs to look at in the morning; we then impose them that afternoon. We close hundreds of pages in a matter of hours and then go to press within hours," says Ed Bacsik, division manager who oversees the prepress division. (See the full article.)