For more than five decades, Multi-Craft has served the greater Cincinnati, Ohio business community with premier graphic communications services. The privately-held, family-owned business has set itself apart by offering a full spectrum of services: marketing communications, strategic design, and print – both offset and digital – as well as packaging, finishing and fulfillment.

Providing this range of services demands a highly efficient end-to-end workflow. VP of Manufacturing Tom Gibbs knew that using a manual planning process and desktop imposition software to "redraw" the plans was holding the company back from automation and productivity gains. So, when the company decided to upgrade its Rampage prepress software, they selected Metrix as the perfect complement.

"Our manual planning methods and imposition software were inefficient and error prone," explains Kevin Coombs, Prepress Manager. "With Metrix, we complete estimating, planning and prepress in less than half the time. The efficiency and cost savings are tremendous."

Coombs recalls that Metrix was being used for live production by the end of the first week, and that by the end of the second week all production had been moved over to Metrix. "We still have our old imposition software, but it's on a machine that we don't have plugged in," says Kevin. Coombs notes that formerly tedious and unprofitable jobs now fly through the system. A local printer contracted Multi-Craft to do a job that involved 60 versions of a product on 20 press forms. "With our old software, creating the layouts would have required three to four hours," says Coombs. "But with Metrix, we decided to try importing a CSV file, which we'd never done before. We read the how-to, made the Excel file, and bam! The job was planned in 10 minutes. Not only that – it was on its way to the press room within 30 minutes! Instead of taking forever, it was instant."

Time savings is only part of the story, however. Kevin Coombs recalls a project where estimators compared plans that were generated with and without Metrix. The Metrix-generated plan saved $11,000! Once the job has been won, Multi-Craft planners are tasked with using Metrix to "beat the estimate" if they can. Sometimes this means more significant savings, though the Metrix estimators have usually found the most efficient job plan and so are pretty hard to beat.

"Everyone," explains Kevin, "estimators, CSRs, planners, and prepress and production teams of varying experience levels and software savvy, have been impressed with how easy Metrix is to use, and how it makes short work of both simple and complex projects."