I am Chris de Jonge, Head of IT at Fotofabriek, and my goal here is that I like to be least wasteful at the most efficient way.
We started of at a beginning phase of Ultimate, our use of Ultimate was very small in our company and it grew with us. At the current moment we are using (Ultimate Impostrip) Scalable.
Scalable is something that we really need at this moment. It helps us to scale with the company and the amount of orders. The nice thing about (Ultimate Impostrip) Scalable is that we can upscale or downscale at will. We can change our plans. We can send a quick email and have twice the processing power available to our impositions, so we can keep up with the peak-season, but also have a stable flow in the off-seasons.
Also, on the finishing side, we can handle thousands and thousands, milions of files every week or every day.
We use scalable for having very tiny PDF files and combining them in gang runs, so we can keep up with the amount of orders that we currently have.
You don’t have to program anything yourself, we don’t have to spend hours and hours developping our own software or going with different workflow softwares. But the nice thing in Ultimate is that with one big package, you can do every type of finishing, you can do any type of file that we input, from JPEG’s to PDF’s. We can use an XML input in Scalable, we can use Ultimate’s own imposition language (UICL) so we can still program something ourselves with our own front-end and let Impostrip generate our impositions.
Ultimate Impostrip gets an input of PDF’s for our printing machines. It’s good at imposing, it’s good at gang-running but we need to have something after that. The product needs to be produced after the sheets have been printed or the rolls have been printed on our wide-format printers.
Ultimate Bindery helps us with integration with our finishing devices so we can have an automatic flow from sheet, to cut, to end product. So it’s a full-based solution that we are using in-house to integrate our machines in a workflow that work together and work on one single file, one single output.
We are also already using the new nesting algorythm of Ultimate Impostrip (2023.2) to generate our nesting for our roll-based printers and our sheet-based printers.
That reduces waste and that is something I find very important, and Fotofabriek finds it very important.
We like to be as circular as possible so we have as little waste with the most efficient nesting and the most efficient gang-runs. We started off with the ‘old’ nesting engine, it was good, I couldn’t complain. But the new nesting engine is like a new generation. It’s something that is completely build up from the ground, it’s new, it’s better, it’s faster, it’s more scalable. You can integrate it within Ultimate Impostrip Scalable to have multiple nesting engines, so that is something very important. We can do high volume nesting, and high efficience and high quality nesting and that’s the most imposrtant for us currently.