Foster City, Calif. – May 15, 2008 – EFI, the world leader in customer-focused digital printing innovation, today announced that St Ives U.S. Division has standardized on Hagen Prograph at its two printing facilities, resulting in significant cost savings, productivity gains and automation improvements. St Ives U.S. is an award winning web offset, digital and sheetfed printing solution provider with well-known clients such as News America, Ford Motor Company, Macy's, Kay Jewelers, Domino's Pizza, and hundreds more.

St Ives U.S. has been an EFI Hagen OA user for six years and recently installed Prograph publication planning software to realize even greater improvements in productivity. Providing a robust and advanced accounting package with high-end applications for estimating, job management, scheduling, purchasing, inventory and fulfillment, Hagen OA allows St Ives U.S. to collect, share, analyze and respond to information in real-time. Prograph's integration with Hagen offers comprehensive planning capabilities, including versioning, complex imposition, bindery planning and distribution tools, enabling St Ives U.S. to make more informed business decisions and streamline their production process. Their planning and shop floor data collection capabilities will be further enhanced with the forthcoming addition of PrintFlow dynamic scheduling.

"Hagen has taken us from cumbersome manual administration to a smooth automated operation. It gives us the knowledge to quickly make decisions that improve operations, which has lead to thousands of dollars in cost savings," said Wayne Angstrom, Chairman and CEO of St Ives U.S. Division. "The solution has enabled us to decrease schedule spans, reduce human intervention in the production process and deliver better customer service."

The recent integration of Prograph with Hagen has brought beneficial changes for St Ives U.S. Angstrom notes that Prograph has completely changed their digital pre-press department, allowing the company to merge the production planning and customer service groups together. "Even with fewer people the result has been a ten percent increase in productivity and an improvement in customer service, since we have more accurate information to pass along to our clients," he said.

Their billing process is benefiting from the Contract Management feature in Prograph, which allows St Ives U.S. to represent long-term contract pricing they have in place with clients, a common practice for publication printers. The system then helps them generate the invoices based on these contracts using the planning data in Prograph. 

"The bottom line is that print service providers in our space who aren't using EFI Hagen Prograph are in trouble," concludes Angstrom.

The latest release of Hagen Prograph will be on display at drupa 2008, 29th May to 11th June in Dusseldorf, Germany, in EFI's booth (stand C01, Hall 5) as well as in the JDF Experience Parc (Innovation hall, Hall 7). For more information, please visit EFI at drupa, www.efi.com or contact 1-800-875-7117.