Princeton, NJ – 7th December 2005 -- ProImage has today announced that The Kansas City Star (circ. 267,273 Monday to Saturday, 377,094 Sundays), part of the Knight Ridder Inc. newspaper group, is installing ProImage’s NewsWay complete workflow solution for its new state-of-the-art $199 million USD printing and distribution plant a short distance from its main building in Kansas City, MO. “During our research we visited lots of CtP sites using a variety of workflow solutions. There was a high degree of satisfaction amongst the NewsWay users that we visited, but it was also NewsWay’s ease-of use, flexibility and the cost-effectiveness of ownership that made the decision easy for us,” says Randy Waters, Kansas City Star’s VP of Production. “The new presses will come on-stream next summer and will bring new product and new zoning capabilities, as well as new opportunities in commercial printing and advertising pre-prints. We also plan a change in web width. The ProImage solution will allow us to easily and quickly adapt to these many changes.” Rick Shafranek, ProImage America VP of Sales adds, “Workflow is to do with people, not just files. Comprehensive tools for collaboration within NewsWay will permit The Kansas City Star’s people to work together more efficiently than ever before. NewsWay‘s intuitive interface will allow them to plan jobs, automate the workflow and more easily manage the entire production operation. Where there are errors or late changes, raster imposition allows the user to redo only the page or separation in question, not the entire job. Correction cycles are therefore faster and errors are reduced.” At The Kansas City Star NewsWay will manage and track pages from a CCI Europe front-end system to four Agfa 3850 Advantage CtP machines, Autologic (now Agfa) filmsetters, four K&F punch benders, through to an EAE press control system controlling four new KBA Commander presses. “Any authorized user with an Intranet or Internet connection will be able to access our (NewsWay) workflow system, and if our rapidly changing demands make it necessary, they can make changes to the automatic workflow through a standard browser, 24 hours a day,” adds Randy Waters. “Another valuable feature that distinguishes NewsWay is its edition planning capability. NewsWay will automatically create the edition plan by importing a file from the EAE press control system. The planner will be customized to our precise needs including updating for changes to our edition and zoning requirements.” NewsWay will also burn the sorting and press cylinder information on to the plates, as well as send ink data to the EAE system for ink presetting. In addition, NewsWay will also provide us with a great deal of valuable production management information.” How pages will flow through the production process: Files created by the CCI system will be received automatically by the NewsWay server. Then the NewsWay system’s embedded RIPs will load balance output to maximize throughput of the output devices. After approval, RIPed pages will be automatically paired and imposed according to product; NewsWay will then burn page furniture on to the page; a bar code for plate routing purposes will also be burnt before the plate is output. NewsWay will then track plates through the K&F punch benders and report on the plate status. For back-up purposes The Kansas City Star intends to move some filmsetting equipment to its new facility. NewsWay will therefore create PDFs at the correct resolution for either film or CtP output, as well as for archival and online purposes. It will also create the TIFF files required by the EAE system for ink presetting. All of this is achieved automatically within the system. Randy Waters sums-up by saying, “We knew that to successfully implement CtP it would be necessary to first build a secure digital workflow foundation. The NewsWay software is sufficiently feature-rich to provide that secure solution. It will not only resolve our many workflow challenges, but will also report on workflow all the way from our front-end systems to the presses controls. This makes our job of complex printing much more simple.” ProImage is providing a separate workflow for The Star’s commercial work that includes receiving data from an FTP (file transfer protocol) site and interfacing with a OneVision system.