TruArt Color Graphics

TruArt Color Graphics Implements Virtual Ticket and Job Manager

TruArt Color Graphics of Iowa City, IA, is a commercial printer providing both sheet fed and web printing along with full electronic prepress services to its commercial printing customers. TruArt also works closely with other divisions of their company who specialize in specialty advertising and worldwide calendar distribution.

TruArt employs MetaCommunications' Workgroups for digital asset management, electronic job ticketing, data collecting, job tracking, and costing. Prior to implementing these systems, TruArt prepress employees had been entering job information into a Logic/Covalent print management system, which was used to log time spent, materials used and costs incurred. TruArt made their purchase of Workgroups because, according Lori Livingston, Prepress Supervisor "The Logic/Covalent system was cumbersome for the operators on the Macintosh side, and it wasn't very intuitive. The MetaCommunications system is exactly what we were looking for. It is fast and easy to use, new operator training is simple, and it has made our entire operation considerably more efficient."

From a management perspective, tracking job costs and generating invoices couldn't be easier than with Workgroups. All of the costing and material usage information the system tracks is instantly available for viewing and printing at any time throughout the workflow process, and after the job has been closed. "The end of the month was always a hectic time for accounting," recalls Livingston. "Gathering all of the invoice information often took days. Running Workgroups, costs are recorded along the way, at every step, and the invoice is there waiting at the end. You just close the job and you're done."

Workgroups has made archiving an automated process, and locating those archived resources is very easy.
Lori Livingston, Prepress Supervisor

Prior to implementing Workgroups, TruArt's asset management system was entirely paper-based. Like many commercial printers before the advent of electronic tracking and ticketing, finding old images and job information often amounted to hours of searching through stacks of paper documents.

"This is the main area where Workgroups has helped us," says Livingston. "We no longer need to refer to a paper archive list. Workgroups has made archiving an automated process and locating those archived resources very easy." To manage new files and assets, TruArt employees simply drag the files from where they are located on the network directly into Workgroups. This instantly associates the files with the job and the customer they are being produced for. Files can also be dragged from one job to another, allowing Workgroups to instantly repurpose the file to the new job.

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