Cary Sherburne: Hi, I’m Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink.com. I’m here with Joanne David who is President and CEO of Ultimate Technographics and we’re going to talk a little about imposition. And I’ve been around the industry, I don’t count anymore the years. But I can remember seeing people folding things up with paper, and trying to figure out which page goes with what. I could never understand any of that stuff. But maybe you could talk a little bit about, first of all, tell us a little bit about Ultimate. And then we can talk a little bit about what you see as the trends in imposition, and the important things that people should consider.

Joanne David: We started imposition, the first imposition software in 1989. That was about postscript era, and now we’re in pdf. We’ve built a lot of features into our software, but what is most important, I think, today is automation. And we have introduced new functionalities that are taking into account short runs and optimize for faster and wider presses. So, imposition has been developing even today, so it’s quite amazing.

Cary Sherburne: And it’s not a standalone process, right?

Joanne David: It needs to be connected, exactly, with a number of other softwares, especially for customers that would want to receive jobs from the Internet, capture more business that way. But those runs are often very short runs, and personalized so the whole workflow needs to happen in a snap without any manual interventions. So this is a challenge today, and that’s what we do.

Cary Sherburne: Another thing, if you think about in the old days, conventional offset workflow you had a 40-inch press, you had a 29-inch press, whatever. You would do the imposition for that press. But today, a lot of times the decision about which press, or whether it’s digital, or offset, or what size, where it’s going, is made at the last moment.

Joanne David: Yes, it’s done on the fly. Actually, those decisions can be done. And just a change of the workflow can happen and take into account a new press capabilities, and also finishing. So, yes, you’re right that, again, needs to be done, and it needs to be done on the fly.

Cary Sherburne: The sort of final thing I wanted to kind of bring up is the idea of ganging, because especially as people go into e-commerce, like you said, getting lots of smaller jobs. And so the ability to take some of those smaller jobs and gang them together, optimized for ink colors, for paper, for delivery times, for whatever the criteria are. So that rolls right into the whole imposition story as well.

Joanne David: Absolutely. In fact, what we do is less about planning for offset. The ganging is a rethink. We rethink about ganging in a sense of automating this process, from getting the orders based on quantity and sizes, and automatically analyze the best positioning of these jobs in order to save paper and produce automatically.

Cary Sherburne: But the operator can intervene if they want.

Joanne David: Absolutely. The operator can intervene, but the wishes of our customers is do it smart and do it automatically. So AutoFlow and Impostrip OnDemand is really the tool that delivers this functionality.

Cary Sherburne: Ultimate Technographics. Great. Thank you.

Joanne David: Thank you, Cary.