COMPANY - Digital Archiving Clients - Mercurius Kunstdrukkerij

The DAX Prepress Archive Solution has won the 2008 Innovation Prize. We recovered our investment in the new archive solution within 6 months.
Mr. Ron Brinkman, Manager Prepress Department.

The company
Kunstdrukkerij Mercurius is a prominent Dutch printing company, renowned for its multi-purpose offset and high quality (art) printing. As Mercurius is part of an internationally operating concern, it realises approx. 30% of its turnover at customers abroad. Beside its knowledge in the field of offset print, Mercurius is also specialised in printing on different types of substrates such as vinyl, foil stamp, three dimensional designed images and comparable products. 

The challenge
The prepress department processes orders in the form of collections of files that are kept together in a Folder/File structure. The prepress process has the objective to create a data set that can serve to print matter. The Folder/File structure of the printed matter should be fixed for all orders, along with a naming convention which provides everyone involved with a common understanding of the data belonging to each order. As several employees could be involved, a manual implementation of these structures/naming conventions frequently show deviations if these structures are created manually for each order.

Finished projects must be archived and can be removed from the company file server. For new projects, in many cases data belonging to previously archived orders must be retrieved as these new orders are sometimes related. Recently archived projects are more likely to be required for re-use than older ones.

Solutions
Archiving orders is often considered as a tedious and time-consuming activity, therefore this part of the prepress process was ideal to automate and integrate into the regular prepress workflow. This can be triggered by the fact that finished orders can be recognised by their status in the companies ERP system.

In order to meet the challenges and budgetary requirements posed by Mercurius, DAX Archiving Solutions proposed its File & Folder Archive Software in combination with the DAX On-Line Archive Solution.
The File and Folder Archive Software in combination with its JDF module provides the connectivity between the actual Archive Storage and the ERP workflow of Mercurius (CERM). The JDF module enables to interpret this industry specific description format where print jobs are described by means of the so-called Job Definition Format.

File and Folder Archive Software (FFA) provides the following functionality:
1. The ERP system sends a JDF description file, describing the actual order to the FFA-JDF module. This module interprets this description and creates automatically the required File & Folder structure on the company server. It creates a uniform file/folder structure for all orders.
2. Network users have precisely the correct access rights, but are unable to deviate from the established file/folder structure. This creates uniformity for each and every order that is processed.
3. When the order is closed in the ERP system, the JDF ticket is used again to trigger the archiving process. At this point all files belonging to that specific order are automatically archived into container files and send to the on-line (hard disk) archive.  Projects are restored by means of a Web browser interface, where the archive can be searched on relevant metadata.

The DAX On-Line Archive provides:
1. An on-line archive provided by 1 TB hard disk cache which ensures the immediate restore possibility of recently archived orders.
2. An off-line and infinitely expandable DVD archive where the older orders have been sent to. When new incoming data requires more space, the oldest and least accessed data is automatically purged off-line, leaving the most recent data immediately available. This is done by a professional disc publisher which provides automatic and unattended burning of DVD discs. Furthermore, each disc is automatically labelled with a unique label, providing a direct physical identification for all archive discs.
3. Automated duplicate disc creation for each disc created. These duplicates are kept on a different location for reasons of recovery in case of disasters etc.

Especially the integration into the companies ERP system provides improved efficiency in comparison with the situation before the system was in place. Users are no longer required to do unnecessary actions in preparing the file/folder structure as well as manual archiving.
Current practice also shows that 80% of the orders are retrieved from the on-line (hard disk) archive, requiring no manual intervention at all. Ron Brinkman, Manager PrePress, estimates that the archiving solution has saved at least 1 FTE which proved it to be a very cost-efficient inversion.
Furthermore, the complete Prepress Archive Solution was awarded the 2008 Innovation Prize by the Mercurius holding.

More information:

• Prepress Archive Solution

• Kunstdrukkerij Mercurius