ATC lets loose its creativity

As one of France’s most prolific suppliers to creative and advertising agencies, ATC needed a dependable solution to power its fleet of printers and cutters. With Caldera, it has gained not only workflow stability, but also faster turnaround. 

For more than 20 years, ATC (Autorise Toute Créativité) has specialised in indoor and outdoor signage, vehicle wrapping, adhesives, and point-of-sale while, more recently, branching out into textile printing. ATC’s 68 employees generate an annual turnover of €12 million from four production facilities in Lyon, Paris, Annecy and Rennes, occupying 3,000sq m of floor space. The company has positioned itself as one of the leading wide-format digital print houses in France and is recognised as a key player in the graphics and advertising markets. 

Of particular note is the business’s vehicle wrapping activities, including publicity caravans for the Tour de France, for which it has a dedicated in-house team of highly skilled fitters. ATC is also known for using micro-perforated adhesive films for window and building graphics, as well as very large-format tarpaulins, such as at the Stade de France arena. Elsewhere, the company is exploring applications for Re-Board printing. 

To manage these diverse projects, the company has invested in a wide range of equipment including eight roll-to-roll printers and two flat-bed printers encompassing solvent, eco-solvent, UV-curable, and dye-sublimation ink technologies, plus three flat-bed cutting machines. This broad plant list is driven exclusively by Caldera’s GrandRIP+ solution, augmented with GrandCut and EasyMedia options for cutting and color management. 

Digital workflow manager Pierre Gaimard has twelve years of experience in the field. “We had major problems RIPing very large files,” he says, explaining the company’s set-up prior to Caldera. “Either it could not be done or the computational speed was excessively long. There was a shortage of options in the tiling modules, and it was difficult to manage all our cutting systems due to compatibility issues with older systems.” 

His decision to replace the RIP software was prompted by certain business-critical functions offered by Caldera, including tiling and VisualCut. The optimized, powerful tiling module has proved to br simple to use and delivered significant productivity gains, while VisualCut improved the efficiency and flexibility of ATC’s print-and-cut workflow with automatically generated cut marks and cut files. 

Gaimard certainly witnessed sizeable improvements, particularly in the stability of the production workflow. “We have far fewer problems with print file interpretation, processing time and file size limitations,” he observes. “Our teams save a lot of time with the straightforward and extremely versatile tiling tool, which automates finishing marks and web cutting. We’re much more flexible now we can generate reliable cut files for all our machines. 

“Caldera is a great tool for managing spot colors and print profiles,” Gaimard adds. “We have noticed a smoother production workflow, giving us greater responsiveness to ever-shortening deadlines.”