Montreal, Canada – Ultimate TechnoGraphics, leader in imposition and finishing automation solutions, is proud to announce a new edition to the Cober user story, highlighting how the renowned Canadian commercial printer Cober pushes the barriers of growth with their HP Indigo presses and Ultimate Impostrip®, even during the pandemic.

Cober is a renowned commercial printer with over 100 years of innovation and client relationships. Cober’s vision is to offer a perfect blend of services that’s more than just ink on paper.

In 2019, they shared a first user story to highlight the benefits of prepress and postpress automation. At the time, they were planning to expand their business with more SKUs and bonified offering. This user story explained how future-proofing their print business enabled Cober to print over 1000 jobs every day, without any manual intervention.

Subsequent to this, the Covid-19 pandemic interrupted the normality of all businesses worldwide. As with many businesses, Cober had to adapt to the regional and local protocols to control the spread of the Covid-19 virus. Fortunately, print businesses were considered an essential business in Canada so Cober remained operational. Most, if not all their non-manufacturing staff switched to working remotely, while their manufacturing team modified their behaviours and activities to maintain proper social distancing and wear personal protective equipment.

According to Erwin Driever, VP Technology at Cober: ‘’We benefited greatly from having processing and manufacturing automation in place, which gave us the advantage of being able to manage and produce orders remotely, as much as possible. It’s highly possible that we will continue to allow some of our non-manufacturing staff to work remotely as it has been highly effective’’.

‘’As a result, we could continue to operate, safely, supporting our customers and we were fortunate to be able to grow portions of our business during some difficult economic times.” says Erwin Driever. That has led to Cober investing in new equipment, tools and led further to expansion and additions to their automation workflows and to updates and enhancements in many of their manufacturing processes. Since 2005, Cober has updated and expanded their portfolio of devices a number of times currently operate an HP Indigo 7500, 7800, 10000 and two 12000 Digital presses.

Cober has been using Ultimate Impostrip® imposition solutions for several years to automatically impose all of their short run products, book products in various layout formats. Thanks to Ultimate’s solutions, the Canadian printer was able to continue producing at a pre-pandemic pace. Having invested in a future-proofed infrastructure where digital printing and workflow automation all the way to finishing are an integral part of their processes, Cober was able to surf on the challenges, and quickly adapt to continue offering excellent customer service across the range.

Their willingness to embrace new technologies and new opportunities even if they seem incredibly difficult, or sometimes impossible have made them a reference in the Canadian and North American printing industry. As Erwin Driever concludes: ‘’We are always willing to challenge our manufacturing and business processes and workflows, updating and enhancing them to create a highly automated workflow with visibility and management of all orders in a streamlined and efficient manner, regardless of whether orders are produced in our offset press or digital press environment.’’

A full version of this user story is available on Ultimate TechnoGraphics website through this link: https://imposition.com/testimonial/cober-pushes-growth-barriers-during-pandemic/.