Production Workflows

work·flow ( P ) Pronunciation Key (wûrkflo)
The flow or progress of work done by a company, industry, department, or person. The rate at which such flow or progress takes place.

workflow
1. <operating system> The scheduling of independent jobs on a computer.
2. <job> The set of relationships between all the activities in a project, from start to finish. Activities are related by different types of trigger relation. Activities may be triggered by external events or by other activities.
3. The movement of documents around an organisation for purposes including sign-off, evaluation, performing activities in a process and co-writing.

Darren has specialised in print production workflows for over ten years through a variety of companies including design, pre-press and printing. This experience is offered to clients independently or in partnership with other suppliers so that you can ensure you are getting maximum advantage from your production environment.

"Hit Ink's products & services have enabled our production facility to be leading edge. We have taken control of our clients work, offering greater efficiencies, control of the whole process, and without compromise to quality." - Ubaldo Merlino, Print Production Director. Clemenger Harvie Edge

There are many technologies and systems on the market today, not to mention the constant upgrades of existing products in the graphic arts industry. Our approach is to not only address technology, but more importantly look at existing infrastructure and procedures in consultation with the people within your organization. Experience shows that often maximum gains efficiencies can be reached by changing old work habits, increasing communications and utilising time and resources as best as possible.

Some products in the market, have a proven track record for both functionality and support, and cannot be looked past as far as an efficient, but importantly, reliable production workflow system is involved. Three products that fully integrate together or come as separate modules, and that make up an extremely efficient workflow system, are HELIOS, Cumulus and Xchanger. Not to mention Hit Ink's own products for artwork approval and digital asset management.

HELIOS - smart ideas for better networking!

HELIOS Software GmbH is a leading provider of high performance networking and client/server software products for Macintosh, DOS/Windows PCs, and UNIX. The HELIOS server software makes UNIX and RISC-based machines powerful and scalable servers for desktop PCs. HELIOS also offers heavy-duty print spoolers, and is a recognized leader of OPI, color management, and PDF workflow solutions. A convenient print pre-check software and profile generation tools for ICC-compliant color management complete the product collection.

HELIOS products are suitable for general office use and also fit extremely well the server needs of the prepress and printing industries. The server software is designed for performance, reliability and ease-of-handling. HELIOS guarantees equal feature set, identical convenient remote administration, and same release dates for all supported platforms.

Xchanger - on-line briefing and database publishing

XCHANGER - Xchanger is a powerful briefing, digital asset management and publishing system for print production. It lets you manage a virtually unlimited number of products, images, text files and other digital resources with direct links into QuarkXPress or InDesign for pagination of print based material such as retail and product catalogues. Xchanger will not only manage these assets for you, but also automatically create pages from templates in pagination programs. The product can be utilised as a complete package from brief to publication or integrated with your existing merchandising or product systems making the transition from manual content creation to automatic as seamless as possible to the users.

Cumulus - digital assets everywhere

The Cumulus product line consists of three editions and numerous options.
Depending on your requirements and workflow you can decide whether you need Single User, Workgroup or Enterprise Editions and which options you may wish to add on. Canto also offer the HELIOScompanion product which completely integrates the two products by synchronizing the file system with the Cumulus catalogues and allows for on the fly image processing and conversions to multiple formats at the click of a button.

For more information, contact Darren Milne.

Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.