KENNESAW, Ga. -- January 21, 2004 -- Heidelberg today announced that two more customers – Litho Print, Ltd. and Total Print Services - recently installed its Prinance professional Management Information System to provide workflow management for their anticipated growth. Prinance provides complete shop management, including customer quotations, database management, order confirmation, shop floor production tickets, inventory control, shipping forms and job invoicing. It is a system designed to cut expenses and gain more visibility into costs associated with each step of the printing process. To support their new systems, Total Print Services and Litho Print are connected to Heidelberg’s Remote Service program. This allows for rapid repair from afar via direct data connections to certain Heidelberg equipment, thereby increasing uptime and equipment productivity and reducing operating expenses. “We had been using Excel spreadsheets for our job quoting, which was a somewhat manual process – prone to errors. And mistakes can cost you jobs,” said Litho Print President Darrell Templeton. “We were looking for a software package that would close the loop by directly relating the quotation for a set of customer specifications to the purchasing or raw materials and to the actual production ticket used on the shop floor. Prinance is a system designed around that concept. Your quote becomes the specification for what you produce on the shop floor. As you make changes to a job, Prinance captures them and makes the appropriate adjustments. It protects both Litho Print and our valued customers. It is a tremendous time saver in what has become the fast-paced world of commercial printing.” Litho Print is a mid-size commercial printer in Dayton, Ohio, that prints projects ranging from private label credit forms and brochures to direct mail pieces and point of sale collateral. The company purchased Prinance during Graph Expo/Converting Expo 2003 in September and began operating it in December. Templeton expects the new system to help increase profitability, particularly as Litho Print looks to drive its revenue to $3 million in 2004 from $2.3 million in 2003. The company, the fifth largest printer in the Dayton area, currently uses Prinance for customer database management, estimating jobs, quoting, order confirmation and job ticketing and will eventually use the system to track shipping information, invoicing and inventory control, too. Prinance - one of the components of Heidelberg’s Prinect series of application products - is an MIS system that allows printers to comprehensively integrate workflow processes. It bundles the information flow to production and back. This supports the efforts needed to cultivate and extend customer relationships and boosts the efficiency and effectiveness of costing, production preparations and planning, job handling and decision-making at the management level. Key benefits include: - Use of open electronic job tickets for communication between industry software and products along the entire process chain - Easily generated documents for correspondence and automatic email notification through integration with Microsoft Office products (Word and Outlook) - Automatic acceptance of operational data from the CP2000 Center for precise actual and target comparisons during follow-up costing - Consistent job management throughout the plant - No need for multiple entry Total Print Services is a start-up shop based in Gastonia, N.C., that uses a full range of Heidelberg equipment to specialize in short-to-medium-run process work ranging from flat sheets to small books. Owner David Gaddis purchased Prinance because he wanted a system that would grow with his company. “I wanted something I could start with and use from A to Z,” Gaddis said. “I can use Prinance as a small printer and as I expand, it can adapt and take on the requirements of a larger shop.” Total Print Services, which opened only last year, installed Prinance last January and began using it in March. The company primarily uses the system, which feeds into his Prinect Printready prepress workflow, for estimating and quoting purposes. This includes everything from management of raw materials to all accounting needs. “In the next couple of months,” Gaddis said, “we’ll have Prinance capturing all of the shop floor data.” Both Litho Print and Total Print Services support their Prinance systems through Heidelberg’s Remote Service program, which delivers electronic diagnosis without a visit from a technician. When an issue arises, Remote Service gives press operators and technicians the tools they need to get back into production - quickly and efficiently. At Litho Print, for example, Templeton said that problems that once took three hours to resolve can now be rectified in 10 minutes, thanks to technology that allows a knowledgeable Heidelberg technician to look at the same computer screen that the customer is viewing. “Heidelberg’s support on getting Prinance on stream has been outstanding,” Templeton said. “Without Remote Service, I could spend all my time fixing problems and not focusing on my business.” Through Remote Service, Heidelberg’s expert technicians, by using Web-enabled technology, can remotely access a customer’s system, view everything on the printer’s console and resolve any problems as if they were sitting locally on the client’s network during a service call. Heidelberg’s Web-enabled Remote Service has expanded functionality, including: - Real-time visibility: A Heidelberg technician can instantly view the customer’s desktop - Quick diagnosis: Heidelberg can download patches, run applications and upload customer files - Two-way desktop control or view: Heidelberg experts can request a view or control of the customer’s desktop - Two-way application sharing: The customer and the Heidelberg technician can choose to share selected applications to maintain privacy Most of the time, problems are identified and resolved via remote service and printers benefit from increased machine availability, fewer on-site service calls and lower costs. Remote Service – available for CP2000-equipped Speedmaster presses and the Prinect Printready system – is so successful that 70 percent of the service calls are resolved by Heidelberg through remote diagnostics and without a service technician ever visiting the site. “Because I’m a small shop,” Gaddis said, “I need to be out selling my business, not hanging around the shop solving problems.”