Montreal, Canada, - Ultimate Technographics Inc. solution is key to Lupa's web-to-print success in photo books. Starting with only a very few photo album sizes a couple years ago, Lupa today is producing personalized photo books of a wide range of sizes for children and adults, as well as yearbooks, calendars and greeting cards and has plans to introduce single photo print and notebooks in the near future.

Lupa is now the largest digital online photo book retailer in Israel today.

"In every production system there are irritants and bottlenecks that slow the production process down and prevent growth; it was very obvious to us that prepress was the bottleneck and solving it would allow us to increase our productivity, resolve the tedious postpress tasks and open up new opportunities. The biggest aspect of the problem was the lack of proper imposition templates to produce a wider range of products in an automated way using our store-front to connect to. We were looking to get away from programming various aspects of the imposition to try to fit our web-to-print workflow needs. We wanted to concentrate on the business and marketing aspects instead. We turned to Ultimate and gave Impostrip OnDemand Automation a chance. With Impostrip we were able to switch right away to printing batches of orders instead of single books; we were able to load thousands of files instead of only a few dozen at a time", says Ofer Rosenbaum, Corporate Managing Director of Lupa.co.il.

"Impostrip OnDemand Automation has ways to save time in cutting and preparing the books, before each book was printed separately on Indigo paper as a cut and combine fashion where the first half is on the right side and the second on the left side; then after cutting we match the 2 stacks as one book. Today Impostrip OnDemand Automation allows us to print on the sheet two pages from different books to obtain 2 batches containing several books which are cut once to produce our final orders on the Horizon Perfect Binder. This saves time and prevents mistakes!"

"The automatic sorting is done at the end of the day in separated batches of hardcover and soft cover books organized and ready to go to print. We also have job tracking from the system whereby it tells exactly which files were printed. If one order is urgent it goes right away or separately. (…) Our print service supplier is ecstatic with this new way to flow printing to his shop as now it is automated and the system works all night without having an operator attending the press tracking and releasing jobs."

"Ultimate helped us structuring the workflow with a Job ticket system and consumed by Impostrip to reflect the final product we want using the imposition we want on the sheet. Only when it was done that we understood how powerful it was. We understood that the key was to produce the correct JDF file to get the right result every time, repeatedly. The automatic generation of the right job ticket to batch according to criteria like format, binding type, paper type, urgent, super urgent, etc., has many advantages for us and the print provider we work with: no work to bring the files to the HP Indigo DFE and every morning we look at a 2-3 page report to see all the batches from the overnight production. We do more with less. We can say that the Impostrip imposition was made by the backend of the photo book software."

"The benefits are great: the work is organized automatically and we save time and money. Both Lupa and our print service provider are able to get a better margin on the work done and we are eager to increase our business because we are confident in our smart imposition and our ability to deliver higher volume of personalized books, JPEG photos and more."

Impostrip OnDemand Automation will be showcased in Barcelona at the EMEA DSCOOP event. You can also request a demo with Ultimate's imposition experts by contact [email protected] or visit www.imposition.com.