Neue Pressegesellschaft, Ulm (Südwest Presse), and SDZ Druck und Medien (Schwäbische Post), Aalen, commission ppi Media, a company of manroland, to install the prepress workflow around printnet OM, the output management system, at the DHO printing center in Hohenlohe-Ostalb.

The publishing houses' first daily, advertising and business newspapers as well as commercial printing are to be produced at the newly constructed printing center on a manroland COLORMAN press by the end of 2011. ppi Media will undertake the output management, including the RIP, merging, imaging and proofing. In a further step, the printing center in Hohenlohe-Ostalb will become a pilot customer and link OM portal, an integrated Internet portal for the prepress environment in the ppi workflow, to its system. OM portal enables commercial printing customers to communicate directly with the printer. Job data can be uploaded to the printer's output management and accessed there at any time. The latest job status as well as, at a later stage, the PDF page proofs can also be accessed. All of the print products can be downloaded and viewed as interactive magazines that can be leafed through. Updates are entered with the assistance of commented PDF files and returned to the printer. This speeds up communication between the printer and the customer and reduces production time required for proofing, correcting and approving a job.

JobEntry for printer's commercial printing

JobEntry is used for planning and managing the printing house's own commercial printing. This solution enables the printer to define entire printing products and part-products, automatically assign incoming files to pages, impose pages on the printing sheet and export this to printnet OM for controlling subsequent imaging.

Printing for the region

At the printing center in Hohenlohe-Ostalb, Neue Pressegesellschaft and SDZ Druck und Medien are deliberately focusing on hard- and software of the highest quality and technology. "Joint use of state-of-the-art technologies makes us stronger and our print products more competitive as compared with the range of multimedia news on offer. The new printing center is an investment in the printed regional newspaper," said Marino Milite, Managing Director of Südwest Presse Data Service (SDS).