Foster City, Calif. – Nov. 30, 2004 – Solutions from EFI are an important part of operations at Marketing Services by Vectra, which relies on EFI’s PSI management system and PrintFlow dynamic scheduling to increase efficiency and reduce operating costs.Vectra offers a full suite of services, including prepress, printing, fulfillment, inventory and database management, and direct mail to national clients in the retail, financial and restaurant industries. The company has a200,000 square-foot facility inColumbus,OH, with 190 employees and $28 million a year in revenue. Vectra has been using PSI for seven years, and has increased use of the features as the business has matured. “When the company was growing we were very sales driven, and now business management is a necessity,” said Jim Hunsicker, PSI administrator and estimator. “PSI has become our main tool for doing business and we’re extremely happy with it. We rely completely on electronic job tickets and the robust purchasing and accounting features, and many of our sales staff do their own estimating using the system.” Vectra recently implemented EFI PrintFlow, the award-winning scheduling software, with PSI to further streamline their operations.PrintFlow dynamic scheduling allows printers to synchronize and optimize jobs throughout the manufacturing operation by automatically identifying the optimal path for each job based on the available resources, job characteristics, current workload and delivery schedules for all jobs. Comments Hunsicker, “The functionality of PrintFlow is excellent, allowing us to reschedule and re-manage all of our jobs, literally in seconds. With today’s shorter and shorter turnaround times for jobs, it’s virtually impossible to schedule without dynamic software than can take into account new start dates and new event dates and quickly organize everything. PrintFlow can do that. We don’t know of anything else that can! “With our old scheduling board,the notion was that everything was a rush job and couldn’t be scheduled, so everyone had to fend for themselves. Now, PrintFlow lets us proactively look at the schedule as jobs come in, so we don’t panic at the 11th hour.It has improved communication between departments and made sales more accountable to accurate file dates and start dates. As a result, we’re starting to see a reduction in overtime and expenses like expedited freight. We’ve also gained efficiency by running jobs with the same ink colors and types of paper together. We expect to see more benefits like these in the coming months.” New jobs are routed directly into PrintFlow where they are merged into the “active” schedule. The scheduler can perform an unlimited number of “what-if” scenarios to immediately address the impact of changes in equipment or employee availability and/or job alterations. Once a scenario is accepted, the new schedule is delivered seamlessly to all users. The old scheduling board at Vectra has been replaced with a large projection screen in the customer service department and monitors throughout the shop. Vectra has gained a new level of visibility and profitability with PrintFlow.