New York – DME, a leader in personalized direct marketing based in Daytona Beach, Fla., and one of XMPie's first customers in North America, saves time and money by using XMPie's PersonalEffect software and XLIM (pronounced "slim") technology to produce high-volume, full-color personalized print applications.

One of the challenges that DME faced in serving some of its automotive and healthcare industry clients was efficiently processing high-volume personalized print runs with 500,000 or more pieces. About 15 to 20 such jobs account for 80 percent of DME's digital printing business, but optimizing processing speeds for these logically complex yet graphically simple documents to make their production economically practical was always the firm's goal. As a true expert in the full range of XMPie solutions, DME chose XMPie's XLIM technology in order to fulfill its need for speed.

According to Jon Hall, director of Production Technology, DME, "XLIM composition has been the greatest innovation for speeding up our variable print processing. Processing speeds are often 10 to 20 times faster with XLIM, and always at least twice as fast."

XMPie's XLIM delivers ultra-fast composition speeds for graphically-simple documents that do not use all of the design sophistication that Adobe InDesign enables. This includes many of DME's recurring jobs for client applications such as automotive service reminders and healthcare statements. When using XLIM, DME creates the XLIM file from the original InDesign file using the XMPie uDirect/uCreate plug-in. With PersonalEffect 5.0, the latest version of XMPie's one-to-one variable data, cross-media communication solution, this plug-in was significantly enhanced, bringing dramatic improvements in workflow and ease-of-use. uDirect/uCreate now features a live pre-flight window that automatically detects areas in the InDesign file that cannot be faithfully rendered into XLIM. The problem areas are highlighted within the document, and the user can either choose to fix them manually or select a solution proposed by the automatic correction utility – saving valuable time and eliminating operator guess work.

Once the documents of a job are represented in XLIM, processing them through the XMPie uProduceTM server in order to generate the variable data output file streams is extremely fast. DME takes it even further by using eight uProduce Extension servers in order to automatically split the jobs, gaining the benefits of parallel processing.

XLIM also provides a slimmer print file so that DME's presses run at the rated speeds to ensure profitable operations and consistently deliver the full quality of the piece's design and logic. While DME does not share its customers' campaign results, Hall said the XLIM-driven programs are very successful in driving revenue for DME customers, and in improving service to their customers.