EFI, a world leader in customer-focused digital printing innovation, today announced that customer Bradford & Bigelow has added the EFI Monarch Planner and latest EFI PrintFlow modules to its existing EFI Monarch workflow, to bring even more streamlined production and greater cost savings.
 
Based in Newbury Port, Mass., Bradford & Bigelow is a supply chain solution provider in the book manufacturing industry. Over the past three years the company has experienced a decline in run lengths and a corresponding decrease in revenue per job, and realized they needed an even greater integrated workflow and more streamlined production in order to successfully compete for these smaller order quantities.
 
“We have been a very satisfied EFI Monarch and Auto-Count user, and now the timing is right to add the Planner capabilities to our workflow,” said Peter Doyle, executive vice president at Bradford & Bigelow. “We view EFI’s Planner module as a critical application that allows us to integrate the RFQ, estimating, job planning, scheduling, pre-press, shipping and invoicing tasks into one seamless process.
 
“In turn, the Planner software will allow us to process work faster through our order entry, job planning and pre-press departments,” continued Doyle. “The application will also allow us to improve the quality of our work orders and pagination layouts, and decrease the frequency of production inefficiencies that occur as the result of missing and contradictory job instructions. We view Planner to be an ideal tool to ensure that we consistently adhere to our best practices. For every dollar we invest in accurate work order instructions we save $100 in the plant by eliminating inefficiencies, delays and mistakes.”
 
Bradford & Bigelow is also updating their scheduling system to the new version of PrintFlow. The close integration between the Planner and PrintFlow applications allows them to eliminate the manual tasks of creating a pert diagram for each job.
 
For more information on EFI Monarch, visit www.efi.com or contact 800-875-7117.