Cary Sherburne:  Hi, I'm Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink.com and I'm here with Justin Zastrow who is the chief information officer for JP Graphics in Appleton, Wisconsin.  Great to see you.

Justin Zastrow:  Nice to meet you.

Cary Sherburne:  And I wanted to be the first maybe to congratulate you on your CIPPI Award for 2010.  Can you tell us a little bit about which award did you win to start with?

Justin Zastrow:  The one that we won was best JDF implementation in North America.

Cary Sherburne:  Okay and so as you began putting together the configuration that allowed you to win this award what was the major business problem that you were trying to solve?

Justin Zastrow:  The major business problem was that we were spending way too much time upfront getting orders into the works and getting them to the press, so the way that we combated that was we thought that the best solution for us was that we could automate our layout generation for our MIS system to our prepress system eliminating the time of the MAC from our prepress operators.

Cary Sherburne:  So a job comes.  It automatically gets picked up by your workflow or by the MIS system first?

Justin Zastrow:  The MIS system the order is generated in the MIS system and then it is sent into the Prinergy workflow system.

Cary Sherburne:  Okay and the MIS you’re using is high flex.

Justin Zastrow:  High flex MIS, yes.

Cary Sherburne:  Okay, so if you go back to before that what was the kind of timeframe?  How long did it take from the time an order was coming in until you actually had it ready to generate plates?

Justin Zastrow:  I would say we were doing about a four hour timeframe for a regular order that came in via email.

Cary Sherburne:  And now with the new configuration.

Justin Zastrow:  We’re down to about an hour.

Cary Sherburne:  Wow, that’s great.  That’s great.  So now you have a completely automated process.  Is it I mean almost lights out from job in through plate generation?

Justin Zastrow:  If the order is placed over the web then it’s fully lights out.  If we have to…  If we get a disk from the customer we still have to load the images up into the workflow and that is where that hour comes in that we have to get the files ripped and at least place them into the in position even though it’s already created.

Cary Sherburne:  And the MIS does the in position and then hands that off to Prinergy.

Justin Zastrow:  Yes, it does.

Cary Sherburne:  Okay, that’s great and so where do you kind of see this going in the future because obviously you’re not going to stop here?

Justin Zastrow:  We’re looking to further automate our press room as well as our finishing.  We’re running equipment that is not fully JDF compliant at this point, but that is really the next step is to… the next press we buy is going to be able to take the information from our high flex MIS and setup the feeder, setup the delivery, set up the ink keys and that is where our big timesaving will be in the press room.

Cary Sherburne:  And then what about integrating into the bindery?

Justin Zastrow:  We have a trimmer and a folder and a saddle stitcher that we’re all looking to automate each of those processes also.

Cary Sherburne:  Great, so you’re hope is take out as many touches as possible through the process and…

Justin Zastrow:  Absolutely, if we can reduce our make ready time on all those machines that is really the end goal for us.

Cary Sherburne:  Yeah and so do you have an idea of…?  You know one thing that happens a lot of times is you know you’re able to increase your throughput by some percentage and not increase staff.  Do you have an idea what that percentage might be?

Justin Zastrow:  We haven’t looked at that exactly, but we’re hoping for 25% that we can increase without adding more staff upfront or adding more staff in our prepress department.

Cary Sherburne:  That is great.  Well congratulations.

Justin Zastrow:  Well thank you very much.

Cary Sherburne:  That is quite an achievement.