FOSTER CITY, Calif. -- April 28, 2003 -- Swedish direct marketing company OnTime has revolutionized its business to provide a more efficient, color print production service to customers following the installation of three Fiery-driven Canon CLC5000 color copiers and the latest version of Velocity Balance(tm) workflow software from Electronics for Imaging (EFI). OnTime prints and distributes advertising via direct mail and has a number of major customers, of which the biggest is the business university known as Foretagsuniversitet. The company was established over 30 years ago and has 25 employees. "We wanted to increase the value of our direct marketing service and were looking for a solution which would enable us to print high volume, personalized direct mail quickly and efficiently," comments Thomas Haglund, managing director, OnTime. The new solution installed at OnTime consists of three Canon CLC5000 color copiers, three Fiery-based ColorPass controllers, and EFI's version 2.4 Velocity Balance software. Velocity Balance maximizes print production capacity by managing up to twelve devices as a group through one centralized, easy-to-use interface. By managing connected printers as a group, Velocity leverages the combined power of equipment by routing complex color and black-and-white jobs to the most efficient print device in the group configuration. Previously, OnTime printed its direct mail in black and white only using high volume offset technology, which was relatively inflexible and high in production costs. The installation of the new EFI/Canon solution, which features color server technology based on EFI's powerful Fiery Z18, has completely changed and streamlined the production workflow. As a result, the company now prints 80,000 to 120,000 mail shots per week. There are a number of Velocity Balance features that OnTime has found to be advantageous, in particular the automatic job processing capability, which reduces manual labor and job set-up time. This also gives OnTime much greater flexibility, as it allows job details to be changed up to one hour before the job starts printing. The 'Copy Split' feature enables OnTime to print multi-copy jobs across multiple printers, making the process much faster, as it uses the combined speed of all the printers. In addition, the 'Re-route on Error' option has the advantage of re-routing jobs to another printer if one of the printers is jammed or out of paper. OnTime also uses the 'Cover Sheets' option, which prints a bar-coded cover sheet that contains both operator and machine-readable instructions, and is totally compatible with offline collation equipment. This enables the automatic re-collation or re-merging of load-balanced job pages and further reduces manual intervention. Since OnTime has been using EFI's Velocity workflow software, both production capacity and efficiency have increased considerably, and the company has been able to benefit from a streamlined digital production process, faster job turn-around and a greater return on equipment investments. "Despite the fact that the solution has only been installed for a short time and we've only exploited a fraction of its potential, we've already improved our service to the customer and saved money," added Mr. Haglund. The company chose the EFI-Canon solution because it offered great flexibility and operational reliability, but most importantly, it is the perfect solution to meet OnTime's main objective of delivering large direct mail jobs, ready sorted and on time. Having seen the productivity and time-saving benefits gained from Velocity Balance, the company is keen to use EFI's other Velocity modules - Velocity Build(tm), Velocity Estimate(tm)and Velocity Scan(tm) - in the future.