ROLLING MEADOWS, Ill. — Attention to detail and dedication to creating exceptional finished products have impressed companies all over the nation to bring their print work to Image Printing Inc. in Bismarck, N.D. The company, always savvy in following trends of the industry, has made a big stride toward its goal of becoming the leader in high-end commercial printing with the adoption of the “Power CTP” concept from Screen USA. “We like the entire Screen workflow solution: Trueflow, the PlateRite 8000II platesetter and Spekta AM/FM screening method,” said Dave Nelson, secretary/treasurer of the 9-year-old, privately held firm. “Trueflow has many powerful features, like imposition, plate editing and automatic trapping technology. We went from imaging film without a workflow in place to outputting 95 percent of our prepress work using Trueflow.” Image Printing was founded in 1994 on the principal that each employee is responsible for jobs at hand. Everyone — from salespeople to bindery staff — has the power to stop a job or rerun a project if that is what’s necessary to ensure the best possible product. Such commitment has yielded positive results, not only in customer satisfaction but also in the form of numerous awards for printing, creativity, business and growth. Image Printing’s modern, 25,000-square-foot plant houses a state-of-the-art prepress department, pressroom, bindery and fulfillment operation. With a staff of 43 full-time employees and a mix of full-size and half-size sheetfed presses plus color duplicators, Image Printing specializes in high-caliber four-, five- and six-color printing. The company caters to a wide range of corporate, retail, industrial and agency clients, and is renowned for its corporate communications, catalogs, annual reports and packaging-related materials. In addition, Image Printing’s 10-person graphic arts department concepts and produces award-winning logos, brochures and other printed pieces. “Trueflow has allowed us more flexibility in doing what we are especially skilled at, which is graphic design,” Nelson pointed out. “Instead of trying to do output and pushing everything through our output device, our graphic artists are able to spend more time designing because of Trueflow.” Trueflow is an open and intelligent workflow management system that brings together an array of features in a single workflow solution package, including job management, PDF trapping and enhanced network connectivity. Incoming jobs in multiple file formats are preflighted, normalized and automatically converted to PDFs for output to Image Printing’s new high-speed PlateRite 8000II eight-up thermal platesetter and other output devices. Trueflow also facilitates Internet-based communication between printers and their customers, streamlining the process of job submission, tracking, proofing and approval of pages and imposed flats. “It’s an extremely intuitive system,” Nelson said. “The graphical user interface is well laid out. The web-enabled interface enables us to see job progress from any workstation in real time.” According to Nelson, there wasn’t any one thing that tipped the scales in Screen’s favor. There were several factors. “We investigated and compared the different CTP systems available to the marketplace,” he recalled. “We knew that Screen builds platesetters very well and that their technology is first-rate. Having a Screen PlateRite device connected to the Trueflow front end offered a more efficient workflow. The Spekta screening also was a definite marketable advantage. It is going to make us stand out in our market.” Screen’s exclusive hybrid screen technology, Spekta combines the strengths of both AM and FM screening methods. It allows printers to achieve quality and detail usually associated with screen rulings of 300 lpi or more, but under ordinary 175 lpi printing conditions at 2,400 dpi. Image Printing installed the Power CTP workflow last November. The transition went smoothly. Within one month, 65 percent of its jobs were CTP. Within two months, that figure had grown to 85 percent. “Now all of our presses, including our duplicator presses, are tied into the Screen system,” noted Nelson. “There is very little work that doesn’t run through the Trueflow workflow.”