Princeton, NJ – 16th January 2006: The San Francisco Chronicle prints at three remote sites; Union City, CA; Richmond, CA; and at Army Street on the outskirts of downtown San Francisco , and in order to better manage its end-to-end workflow it is replacing its old Intellinet transmission system with ProImage’s modular NewsWay workflow solution. “We have a lot of aging equipment here, and that includes our flexo presses,” says Pat Izzo, The San Francisco Chronicle’s Production Director of Production Operations. “That hasn’t prevented us from installing new technology. NewsWay makes what we have more efficient and productive, and its reporting capabilities keeps us better informed. “Another key benefit for us is in NewsWay’s ability to track pages through all the various workflow steps. To view this graphically we have installed flat screen monitors beside each NewsWay PC workstation. The software will enable us to track page flow and record production operations times such as editorial release, page transmission, film and plate output, and plate to press times, allowing us to recognize and streamline our production operation. Out technicians are ecstatic; we can now do things, such as remote proofing, that previously were not possible. “In today’s prepress digital process we need to be able to accept files in formats not only for printing, but also for distribution. NewsWay does this, and benefits us by merging, stitching, proofing and distributing,” states Mr. Izzo. “NewsWay uses a standard browser and PC hardware to manage imposition, job planning, network workflow management, output management, resource scheduling and production tracking,” adds Rick Shafranek, ProImage America’s VP of sales. “The solution also performs load balancing on output devices to maximize throughput. For The San Francisco Chronicle we will create soft proofs and output to both NewsColor hard copy proofers as well as to Agfa 3850 filmsetters. In the future, the newspaper will be able to upgrade NewsWay in order to support and drive CtP devices as well as interface to other existing equipment such as plate scanners.” “ProImage have have proved themselves to be newspaper workflow experts, and the modular nature of the system has allowed us to install only the features capabilities of this feature-rich solution that we need now,” comments Pat Izzo. “We have tentative plans later in 2006 to add additional modules such as Imposition, PDF, and commercial ad stitching to enhance the NewsWay system.” At The San Francisco Chronicle, NewsWay will import page layout data from an existing ALS system and create edition plans for the various zoned editions. It will accept page modules from the CCI Europe front-end system, load balance an existing alfaQuest RIP farm, assemble pages and automatically place them in an Approval queue before routing them to their respective print sites. There, NewsWay will burn text and furniture specific for each print site on to the image, then load balance the data between six Agfa 3850 filmsetters. Once each plate is made NewsWay receives a status message back for plate tracking. Reports are also generated to provide detailed analysis of the page flow throughout the entire process.