September 22, 2006 -- Dallas-based Williamson Printing has a long tradition of entrepreneurship, which has helped the company maintain its leadership position in the highly competitive printing and publishing industry. Joe Novak, Director of Technology, has been a proponent of adopting new technologies since he joined the company in 1995. At that time, his goal was to establish a JDF/JMF workflow, which would strengthen and differentiate the company though streamlined automation and increased production efficiencies. This summer, Williamson Printing took an important step toward cementing that goal, serving as the Beta Site for a much-anticipated 2.0 version of LithoTechnics’ award-winning product, Metrix. This revolutionary job planning software has been turning heads since its initial product announcement at Drupa 2004 because of its ability to dramatically and automatically – with the click of a mouse – transform the laborious task of layout planning into a quick and easy step in the print production workflow. Metrix 2.0 takes the same ease-of-use and sophisticated ganging technology of Metrix 1.7, but now adds the ability to automatically calculate multi-signature bound jobs, directly from JDF or operator input. With this new release, Metrix 2.0 becomes extremely attractive to the broad commercial printing market, and therefore caught Joe Novak’s eye. “Before we introduced Metrix 2.0, we had established islands of JDF-enabled devices,” explains Joe Novak. “Metrix is the ultimate bridge, allowing us to link our complete JDF workflow together, from MIS, estimating and scheduling, to prepress, press and post-press.” Williamson Printing found it fast and easy to integrate Metrix into its existing production workflow, which consists of Prism Win MIS software, EskoGraphics Scope 3.0 prepress system, and Heidelberg presses. Metrix 2.0 imports the JDF file with basic job specifications directly from the MIS system, and then, in a matter of seconds, calculates the optimum layout for the product size, press and paper stock. The Metrix operator adds production-specific parameters such as trims and bleeds at this point, if necessary, and Metrix appends this data to the JDF file. The “complete JDF,” containing a high level of metadata about job processes, is then sent on to the JDF-enabled prepress system. “This is the true promise of how JDF is designed to work,” says Rohan Holt, developer of Metrix. “Metrix 2.0 is helping companies realize the full potential of JDF automation.” Williamson is also using Metrix 2.0 to export fully imposed, print-ready PDFs. This gives the company great flexibility and versatility in its implementation. The dynamic and intelligent editing features of Metrix 2.0 facilitate the last-minute changes and just-in-time production decisions inherent in print production. It has also helped the company reduce the number of errors that inevitably arise when desktop imposition operators manually enter data from hand drawn layouts. Joe Novak plans to apply Metrix 2.0 to 95% of his jobs, because of the significant savings. He reports that Metrix reduces a 15-minute manual imposition job to a 2-second task. Similarly, he cites a post-press cutter job, which normally takes 30-minutes to set up, being accomplished in 10-seconds. LithoTechnics’ Metrix 2.0 is a product that perfectly supports Joe Novak’s credo that, “Printers can make money, not by raising prices, but by increasing automation.” Metrix 2.0 will be demonstrated by LithoTechnics at GraphExpo 2006, in booth #5242 and at various partner locations throughout the show.